Vanessa's Journal

Jan. 13

Today I was back at the field station getting more computer work done while Lao Yang and Lao Fan checked traps. The morning went a little differently than what I had planned.  It was the day to order our food from the grocery store down in town. Usually I had been going and hand-delivering our shopping list when I hiked down the mountain, but this time I just could not bring myself to deal with the hassle of hiking down, staying in a hotel, finding rides, etc. with all that has been going on. So it was my job to call the store and put in our order over the phone from the field station.

Sounds simple, but it actually turned out not to be.  Lao Wang always works so hard managing our food needs and he writes out a long list of what we need each time.  I couldn’t read most of it either because there were Chinese characters I didn’t know or he had written it in shorthand.  So I spent a good amount of time pouring over the dictionary to decipher our 30-plus items. I hope we actually get the right food. Perhaps the funniest part is the fact that nobody can understand the difference between my ‘4’ and “10” in Chinese because my intonation is bad.  So when ordering a certain number of things, the lady on the phone had me saying “4 as in 1,2,3,4 and 10 as in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10” so as not to get them mixed up. Last year there was a funny incident where we got sent massive amounts of cookies because they thought I said 10 days worth of cookies instead of four. 

After that debacle, I thought about how ridiculous the system is and it’s such a waste for poor Lao Wang to write out an entire detailed grocery list every week from scratch and have somebody else try to figure out his hand writing.  So I took it upon myself to type up an organized grocery sheet on the computer with all of the items we ever order so that you can just put the number next to it each time and everything is easy and clear.  In the end I think we had maybe 50 items. That was a lot of Chinese dictionary work, but in the end it was worth it because Lao Wang was so excited about it. I know him well enough to know that he loves things to be organized but isn’t from the computer generation so he sometimes appreciates help in that regard. Anyway, now I know how to write a multitude of vegetables and cooking ingredients in Chinese, so it was definitely a productive use of time. 

Then I read some more of my third panda survey book. I’m almost done with Chapter 2 and I’ll wait until then to comment some more on it.  Another piece of exciting news from today is that I got the dial-up Internet to work up here.  It was so strange to be sending e-mails from here.  It is very slow and unstable, but is still usable.  I am on trap checking duty for the next two days, so I think I will go now and try to rest up for it.