The conference proper began on the third day and all of a sudden everything got real formal, real fast. The rest of the attendees showed up in their fancy business suits and milled about donning nametags and networking. My fellow fieldtrip participants shed their duck boots and khaki hiking pants and donned shiny shoes and ties.

The day began with opening speeches from important seismologists from both China and the US. This was not quite on par with the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, but I was impressed at the gymnastic abilities of the waitresses serving tea during the speeches. They kept each and every one of our tea cups filled to the brim with hot jasmine tea during the whole ceremony, raising and replacing the ceramic lids without making a sound or distracting from the speeches. That's probably the least important part of the whole conference, but for some reason the formality and grace of the servers in China is fascinating to me. They always look so calm and composed, and there must be some sort of training camp to get them to all bow slightly and extend open palms just right, because they all know how to do it. Anyway, I digress.
After the opening formalities came the keynote talks from the seismo bigshots. After just a few years of being involved in science, I have had endless opportunities to listen to presentations that make me want to drill my eyes out with my pencil and curse the day Microsoft ever invented powerpoint. Scientists are quite good at making interesting things excruciatingly boring, which is probably why most kids would rather be NASCAR drivers and why I often contemplate dropping out of grad school and becoming a farmer/painter/acrobat. Most of these keynote talks, however, were not the typical science talk, they were of the rare variety that keeps me hanging on every word and reminds me why I ever liked science in the first place. There were a few more of these types of talks interspersed throughout the rest of the conference, I'd say on average there was a higher percentage of excellent talks at this conference than usual (but also plenty of eye-drilling talks too).


So the talks went on for the rest of the day, I had a poster that I presented on the work I'm doing with seismically induced landsliding in Seattle, but there wasn't really a designated time for poster presentations like there is at most conferences. People were supposed to view the the posters during tea breaks, but everyone, including myself, just wanted to drink tea and talk to each other. That was fine by me, my poster didn't really have any results on it, though it sure looked nice if I do say so myself. The staff at the hotel taped our posters up with black duct tape. The duct tape didn't hold very well so half the posters would come crashing down during talks, it was kind of entertaining to see the staff scrambling. They even taped some of the posters directly onto paintings on the walls. Anyway, I gained more from one on one discussions with people on the field trip, at meals and in taxi rides than I would have standing at my poster talking to people anyway.

The food for practically every meal was provided by our generous Chinese hosts. The first few days when we were on the fieldtrip we ate out at restaurants in the style I described in previous posts and I usually didn't know what I was eating. When we got to the hotel, however, they had a big buffet for every meal, including breakfast, which was great, but the downside was that they labeled the food! All of a sudden what had been my favorite dishes turned into pig ears or duck blood and pig trachea soup etc. etc. and my favorite foods quickly dropped down on the favorite list and I began to eat more and more apples, rice porridge, potatoes, and eggs. My favorite thing on the buffet was this juice from a fruit I had never heard of before called "pow pow juice." It had such an exotic taste! I figured it was probably chock-full of antioxidants that would cure every disease and it simply hadn't been discovered by US health gurus yet so I chugged glass after glass of it. Turns out they just labeled it wrong, a few days later they changed the label to pineapple juice and it lost all of its glamour...sigh...

Another good thing about the field trip days, besides blissful ignorance, was that there was no "class system." Grad students hung out with big-shot scientists etc. etc., but as soon as the conference began we started sitting at different tables, sometimes they even had an "important person" table up front with extra big floral arrangements. It wasn't mandated, just some unwritten rule about our new formal surroundings or something. At our first meal in the hotel I accidentally sat next to one of the leaders of the National Science Foundation and I ended up being the only person under the age of 60 without a PhD or two and hundreds of scientific papers to my name.

For the first day of the conference they threw a big banquet with endless amounts of fancy food again and all the leaders gave toasts. There were a lot of leaders, so the toasting went on for hours. The leaders from the US gave gifts to all the Chinese leaders in the form of baseball caps and t-shirts from UC Boulder (where the conference was two years ago). The irony was that all the gifts were made in China :)

After the conference I went with a few friends to a place called Jinli Road. This is a major tourist destination in Chengdu, it's a pedestrian marketplace where they sell Chinese arts and souvenirs out of historical buildings. It was a beautiful place, hundreds of glowing chinese lanterns floated overhead and the architecture was stunning, wood screens and curly roofs. I bought some souvenirs and for once I wanted to ensure that they were made in China.


A funny thing about having blond hair in China is that not only do people stare openly, but they also want to take their picture with you. I felt like a moviestar. Some people would ask and pose with us, but other people would just snap a picture real quick and walk away. My favorite one was when a family wheeled an old man in a wheelchair right next to where my blond friend and I were sitting on a wall, so close that they bashed his wheelchair into my knees. They snapped a picture of the old man and his two blond girlfriends and then wheeled him away quickly without ever saying a word or looking us in the eye like we were statues or something.


My favorite things about Jinli road were the 2000 year old shooting game (I got a bullseye!) and fresh squeezed sugarcane juice! Mmmmm....