It was raining in Paris when I arrived.
So the gargoyles were spitting on the streets.
So we went to Champagne.
We raced 900 Belgians, most of them in costume. 
We were the speed of light and a neutrino, that pesky particle that iffy experiments have shown to be fastest in the world. Champagne was served at water stations, with fancy crackers and live music. We tied in the end. It turns out the speed of light is 2:26. Continue reading
My mom and I ran into the Kitesurfing World Championships in the Netherlands this morning.
What am I doing in the Netherlands? you might ask.
I’m checking out the Kitesurfing World Championships.
The story is longer than that, but lieu of an up-to-date update, I’ll refer you to http://www.honeybeesuite.com/extracting-australian-watermelon-honey/. There you will find one of my Australia stories (posted today) and lots of other useful buzz.
Hello little world!
I know it’s been a while. I would have written sooner, but my proxy expired, and I still haven’t figured out how to uninstall my Australian internet program, so there was little hope of my finding out what a proxy is, let alone updating it.
A word on importing bees for development:
Our project manager uses an interactive children’s bee activity to explain, “Beekeeping is always better to do with the local kind of bee. It is always best to try and keep the local animals in their natural home, instead of bringing in animals from other places.”
And yet here I am on planet China keeping western bees in Langstroth hives. Until recently, I did not fully understand why this was, and it made me a little uneasy. You don’t have to take Conservation Biology (though you should) to understand that introducing foreign species is a complicated business.
So it was with great relief that I learned that our bee project is not responsible for introducing Apis mellifera to the Yunnan province. Within the next month, migratory beekeepers will line the roadsides, and their European bees will feast on Asian flowers.
Though traditional beekeepers still keep cerana in log hives around here, most commercial operations work with mellifera. Our project manager is making a bee board game in which players who choose mellifera get two honey tokens for passing ‘go.’ If they choose cerana, they are awarded only one honey token, but they are also immune to the ‘disease’ spaces where mellifera suffers a penalty. This is pretty much how it works in the real world, too.
Ours were the first Europeans honey bees to overwinter in Shangri-la’s high altitude and harsh climate. We wrapped our boxes, and we didn’t pull honey in the fall, and still we pushed sugar water in the spring. Our mission was to determine whether raising honey bees is a viable development project in this area. It was the locals who chose mellifera for the project- they were keen on a honey crop. However, all told, the enterprise proved possible but probably not profitable. Anyway, an interesting experiment.
As far as beekeeping for development (beesfordevelopment.org), there are plenty of complications to consider- spread of disease, competition for floral sources, displacement of traditional beekeeping methods, displacement of native bees, and I have lots more research to do. Will do that. Later.. At the moment I have a city to explore.
We take a van at 9:30 in the morning. One of the volunteers asks if I’ve brought a book. No, I brought a banana, a browning banana, brown from the cold and not from old age. The car ride is 2.5 hours, but I hardly notice time passing. Hard to watch the clock with your forehead stuck to the window.
These are grandfather mountains.
We’re on our way to Bonzilon to restock on tsampa bowls (like these http://www.ymhfshangrila.com/shop.html). Next we visit a Nixi village and purchase black pottery of the hot pot variety. (If you don’t know what a hot pot is, come by for dinner, and I’ll make you one. BYOBunsen burner.)
We will sell these goods at the Handicraft Center- this is where I am living and working these seven weeks- and use the profits to support local artisans. You can read all about it (and about our bee project) on the website if you want. http://www.ymhfshangrila.com/index.html
Our Center is built in the traditional Tibetan style, so we get lots of animals wandering into the courtyard. Where we keep the Small Library, other houses keep livestock. When the cows see our front gate, they think they are home. This results in a lot of startling encounters. Most of the animals are friendly, but we have a slingshot just in case. My housemates use the slingshot to launch rocks at stray cats. It’s springtime, and the raucous tomcats cry like babies-literally, that is the sound of their song- trying to win favor with our lady cat, a Mi.
Our Small Library offers free English and Chinese classes for Tibetan locals. I am constantly realizing that being able to speak English and being able to teach it are two completely different things. How do you explain verb conjugation to a language that doesn’t bother with tenses?
My Chinese is slowly progressing. The other day I went to the supermarket to buy the bees a 50 kg bag of sugar.
“Sugar!” I said, in Chinese, “…big!” and 5 bemused employees helped me to wrestle the bag to the check-out. The taxi driver was not so impressed with the size of my purchase.
“Sugar!” I explained, “…bees!”
Shangri-la is cold and dry, a tough transition after tropical Thailand. I am growing a new pair of lips this week. In the meantime, my mouth cracked and hatching. I can’t smile on my face, so I have to do it in my head.
(That’s an update from March. I planned to post it two weeks ago, but I wanted to upload photos first. Alas, our poor internet connection has broken my blogging spirit. I still can’t upload photos.)
The taxi driver tells us that Snow Mountain is nicer than Napa Hai (Lake) this time of year. He also says it costs 200 RMB entrance. We insist on Napa Lake. After stopping at a pony launch and paying 60 RMB entrance, we drive to a briar patch. The driver points across the plain. Napa Lake is behind that yellow mountain, he says. We set off, and I wonder if my friends are up to the fifteen minutes it might take us to walk to the lake. They have warned me that they don’t like to hike and earlier explained that at high altitude, even talking is healthy exercise.
Two hours later, we are navigating a pack of yaks, following the trajectories of Tibetan pony trekkers in hopes of locating the route to this elusive lake.
Three hours later, the pony trekkers have lapped us. I would like to laugh, but my lips are cracked closed. The water bottle I almost left behind is empty, and I am beginning to have my doubts.
Not that I mind picking my way around wild pig wallow holes on a grassy plain whose mountain crown looks just like Colorado. Not at all! This is my holiday. But I’m the one who suggested Napa Hai, and my Cantonese firends (who, at the outset, cranked American music from their iPods ‘for atmosphere’) are looking a little glum.
Soon we find ourselves bounded by creeks too wide to cross, and we have no choice but to turn back. We cross the path of another pony trekker and point to our entrance tickets.
“Where is Napa Lake??”
Animated conversation ensues and five minutes later, they translate: “This is Napa Lake. We are walking on Napa Lake. It is the dry season.” Oh, my!
“I am disappointed,” she adds.
We turn back. Walking has made us illogical, so we take seeral wrong turns before finding the right road. At some point the girls start playing Name That Song, courteously using American music. I am all over Aaron Carter’s Beautiful Soul.
Dinner is expensive. We stop at literally the first restaurant we see, and it is good. Even better than my vegetarian Korean fried egg on rice is having fond a reliable supplier of chocolate shake and french fries. In case it ever comes to that.
The girls eat their french fries with chopsticks.
How do you say “I want to keep my rat tail” in Chinese?
12 hour bunk bed bus. Everyone was shouting and then everyone was sleeping.
Kunming is bigger than Bangkok. ..?!
I arrive at the bus station four hours early, so I set up camp in a nearby library. Two hours later, a security guard points to the library door. He says something I don’t understand and then hurries downstairs. Either the library is closing or he has gone to get his gun.
My first supper: I walk into the restaurant, and it occurs to me that I can say ‘eat rice’ in Thai, and that is not helpful at all. All Chinese eyes on me and my foreign backpack, and I wish I knew “I’m here to eat,” although I suppose this should be obvious. I hover by the food counter.
The guy from Alberta told me that the easiest way to order food is to point to something someone else is eating, whatever looks good. Unfortunately, the tables are far away, so I won’t be able to manage this without picking up someone’s plate, and this does not seem wise.
The staff speaks to me in Chinese, I speak to them in English, and eventually we exchange money for food. I eat vegetarian… I think. The meal is good, and I am full. I know how to say that in Thai, too.
Throughout dinner, I peruse my Chinese phrasebook. It’s called something like ‘Essential Chinese for Travelers.’ I hope I run in to the sort of travelers who consider ‘mackeral’ to be essential vocabulary.
Boarding the bus: the passengers grab plastic bags on their way in. At first, I am afraid they are barf bags, but we use them to hold our shoes. The bus is orange and plush.
