Planting Rice

Its still not quite fully spring here. Some days are great, other days are cold and almost freezing. Its been raining a lot which is helping farmers to get the fields wet, but for now, rice remains in greenhouses. Here are some pictures, as promised.







These are experimental seeds, so we had to keep track of what was being planted where. FYI-that squatting position was not very comfortable. My legs kept getting numb. This is me with one of my good friends and a post-doc in the lab. We were cleaning out the leftover seeds from the bags. Look how brown it is outside! Nothing is planted yet. Nothing.

I can see Russia from my hotel!

Here I am. Standing in front of a frozen (but thawing) river. That land behind me? Its not China, but Russia. This is the Heilongjiang River which separates Heilongjiang province, China (the capital of the province is Harbin) from the Russian Far East. This weekend I took a trip with some rice breeders from Harbin to the north of the province to plant some experimental seeds in a northern spot of the province.

Included in all the hard work we did (4 banquets in 2 days-ugh), we drove about 20 km north of the village we were working in to visit the river which separates China and Russia. Upon arrival, the officials we were with told me how poor that part of Russia is and how hard the Chinese have to control the border to not let any Russians come over to work. There is a lot of Russian discrimination in China and especially Heilongjiang. Everywhere we went and met new people this weekend, the hosts made sure to announce I was an American because they did not want people to treat me disrespectfully because I was Russian (so they said but perhaps they themselves did not want to be seen with a Russian?).

I know America is six months beyond Sarah Palin jokes, but I still found it amusing that I went to a place so close to Russia. I was at the Russian border last summer in Inner Mongolia, but it was not as funny then as it was now (post-Sarah Palin). I tried to explain Sarah Palin's absurd insinuation that she had foreign policy experience with Russia because of its geographic proximity to her state. But I don't think the car of Chinese people quite understood the humor in the story. Maybe its because most of them are government officials and don't see the humor in making fun of politicians. Or maybe its because they, too, have made similar statements about their own understanding of Russia based on geographical proximity to their province.

We stopped in a Russian store by the river to see what was being sold. Aside from all the binoculars one can buy to spy in Russia, this was my favorite-a selection of random figures on matryoshka dolls.
From Marilyn to Sadam, Mao to Clinton. (They are in front of a mirror, so yes just below the shelf is the reflection of me taking the picture).

Rice pictures to come soon...

Six Month Plan

I am making a schedule. I have six months left in China and a lot of work to do before then. When I first got here, the six months I had when I got here in June before I went home in December seemed like a long time. Now six months is definitely not enough time. But I like feeling pressure to get a lot of work done.

So what is my plan? Minus a week or so in May when a friend is coming from the US to visit, I plan to be in Harbin (or the surrounding Heilongjiang countryside) through August. Rice is being planted in greenhouses now and will be transplanted to the fields in a month or so (pictures to come soon). I am going to spend most of my time between now and August where the rice is growing.

In August the lease on my apartment plus my official residence visa in Harbin expires. I still have work to do in Beijing, so I will probably go to Beijing at the end of August and stay there through the end of October.

October 18 is the Beijing Marathon and (perhaps against my better judgment), I am going to (attempt to) run it. So I hope to finish my research by then, run the marathon, and take a week or so to recover and finish things up here before coming back to the US.

More about the marathon later. I know its silly to run in one of the most polluted cities in the world. But it makes sense to me. And now I'm off to go watch rice being planted for the weekend.