Sanxingdui

From Chengdu I took a day trip to Sanxingdui, a site perhaps an hour away via two fuses. It's two museum buildings on the site of a 20-year-old archaeological dig. There's a very impressing collection of pottery, jade, and bronze artifacts that are like nothing that's been unearthed anywhere else, as far as I could glean from the exhibits. I spent a few hours there, fascinated.

Back at the Chengdu bus station I headed for a nearby monastery to try to get a late lunch at its vegetarian restaurant, which Lonely Planet claimed was open until 3:30. I arrived at 3:15 to find it shuttered. I was famished but took a walk around the monastery anyway (it's called Zhaojue). Nice place, but all the monasteries were beginning to look much alike by now. This one was distinguished by an ugly concrete pond full of small turtles. I'd never seen a higher concentration of turtles outside of a Dr. Seuss book.

Two giggling girls, perhaps 13 years old, ran to to me and asked a question, holding up a camera. I nodded, assuming they wanted me to take their picture, but of course they wouldn't have chased down the one foreigner in the place for that. The excitedly took turns taking one another's picture with me. Then they were off, with a chorus, of "xiexie, sank you!"

I wasn't sure what to make of this, but the girls were too cute and enthusiastic for me to regret having said yes. I said yes to all future picture requests, so I'm probably immortalized on Chinese Facebook pages as the giant, freckled foreigner with the crooked smile.

Famished, I walked back to the bus station, determined to catch a city bus back to the hostel. But after going to the trouble oflocating the buses, and then the right bus, I discovered that the smallest bill I had was Y50, which I was sure wouldn't fly for a Y1 fare. So I went to the taxi stand. The first taxi I got in rear-ended another car on the way out of the lot. I got out which the driver was talking to the inhabitants of the other car and got into a different taxi. I'm pretty sure that's where I lost my fleece, in the back seat of the unfortunate cab. I liked that fleece. All because I didn't have Y1.

I ate an enormous amount of ostensibly Sichuanese food in the restaurant of Sim's hostel, laid down for a bit, and then went to see a Sichuan opera. It was touristy by excellent, with music and puppeteering and flamboyant costumes and face-changing and fire-spitting. I'd been particularly interested in seeing the acrobatics, which were not what I expected: A pretty young woman laid on her back with her feet in the air and deftly turned and tossed first a pot, then a table, with her feet.

Back at the hostel I turned on CCTV International, China's state-run English station, as I got ready for bed. I'd become somewhat addicted to CCTV, partly for comforting background noise but mostly for its window into the government's perspectives and preoccupations. The brief roundup of the day's new reported that Obama was ahead of McCain by 11 points, which made my jaw drop. It wasthe first election news I'd heard since arriving.

Flickr

For all my readers who've been losing sleep about how I can't walk and will probably lose my job and end up on the street, have no fear. I limped for less than 24 hours and am walking (even running for the bus) quite normally now. But the bruise now covers nearly my whole foot. You can indulge your morbid curiosity here.

Speaking of which, my first disgusting foot picture has gotten 27 hits on Flickr in the few days since I uploaded it. Compare that to this picture, which I'm partial to, and which has gotten exactly 0 hits prior to blog highlighting. I mean, I snowshoed into the mountains during a blizzard for this picture and risked ruining my new camera with wet snow, and I think it came out rather well. But apparently all Flickr viewers want is prurient shock value.

Lesson

I've observed before that when I blog about needing/wanting something, it's often miraculously delivered to me: a DVD player, a corkscrew, a digital camera. But I wasn't thinking about that history when I blogged last week about how brown and depressing Pueblo and its environs were. Sure enough, whatever gods there be sent me a three-day snowstorm. Maybe you think that's no big deal because you think it snows all the time in Colorado, but Pueblo is no Buffalo: it gets 10 inches of precipitation a year, and when I was a teenager there I wore sandals for most of the winter. (Ok, so some people thought I was crazy, but I still have all my toes).

While pretty, the snow left me stranded at my parents' house doing nothing while I would rather have been somewhere else doing nothing. One plus: I got to go snowshoeing. Allow me to recommend my debut Canon filmaking project, a clip of our dog trying to hitch a ride on the backs of my mom's snowshoes.

The lesson, in case you missed it, is that I need to be careful what I wish for on The Ninth Floor.

Photographer

I got a new camera for my birthday/Christmas, which means I can now take my own pictures of tumbleweeds. Yay! My pick for the blog was going to be one with horses in it, but I went with reindeer and cacti instead.

Rock & roll sleepover

This weekend three of my friends from Ithaca came down to visit, and we all went to the Virgin Music Festival in Baltimore. Since these friends know way more about music than me we didn't just roll in in mid-afternoon--no, we were there at 10:30 to make sure we didn't miss the first band. Fortunately, they were worth it: Kasabian (no, I'd never heard of them either). NSCV didn't pace herself at all. She was the only one in the crowd dancing during Kasabian, and boy did she put us to shame.

Other acts I saw (in chronological order):
Wolfmother
The Raconteurs
Gnarls Barkley
The Killers
Thievery Corporation
The Who
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Flaming Lips

It was a lot of fun, if exhausting. I'll leave the reviews to the real critics (it's almost my bedtime) and share the language-geek anecdote behind this picture. I saw the sign hanging up at a booth selling some sort of roasted nuts (which didn't smell at all, by the way), and had to memorialize it. When I walked over to take the picture, I had to wait for a guy to take his own photo with his cell phone. As he started to walk away I said, "I guess we both had the same thought. It's just so bad."

Cellphone cam guy: "Yeah, me and my friends have this thing about Baltimore and its inappropriate use of quotation marks."

Me: "I thought it was everywhere, but this is particularly egregious."

Cellphone cam guy: "You're very cool."

Me: "You, too."

And then we went our separate ways.