With a full day planned at the panda base, I made sure that I was 15 minutes early to the bus stop. Partially due to the fact that I didn’t remember the pickup time, but also because I wanted to grab a few dumplings along the way. After cramming down some pork-filled delights, I arrived at 7:30 with what I thought was time to spare. As 8:15 crept by, I knew something was up. By 9:00, a small crowd of elderly men and women decided to converge on my sitting spot and tried to spark up a conversation. They got such a kick out of my attempt to understand and reply that they invited me on their microbus up to Bifengxia. Now the fun would begin.

About 1/2 mile up the road, and unbeknownst to me, was Ya’an’s largest traffic jam. The city has decided to completely rebuild the only road that leads to the panda base and is letting a single lane get by every hour. There I was, lodged into an extremely small micro bus with 6 other Chinese grandparents and my oversized bags of office supplies and freeze drying equipment. As the driver shut off his car and parked in the middle of the road, I didn’t have much to do. So, I pulled out my iPad and turned on the only movie I had uploaded- An Anton Corbijn film on the life of Ian Curtis, the lead singer for the Joy Division.

We were huddled around the iPads 7″ screen for the first few minutes. At least until the lead actor started putting on makeup and dancing around without a shirt on. After that they seemed to lose interest and went back to teasing me about my botched attempts at Chinese. We were parked there in the middle of the road for a good hour. Given that the panda base is only about 12 miles from Ya’an, I think that I might have been able to walk there in about the same amount of time it took to drive.

Nevertheless, I arrived at the base at 10:30 and quickly said hello to all of the managers. I was pretty excited to see all the cubs, so I walked over to the breeding center where the keepers were getting ready to weigh all of the younglings. Perfect timing as it turned out. With so many balls of fur to potentially focus on, I turned my attention to Yang Hua and her noisy little beast. After a quick video and a handshake with Mr. Dong, I had to get back to the office to work on organizing the iPads for the upcoming data collection.

If you think about it, I might not have been able to get a video or see all of the cubs if I hadn’t missed the panda bus, or got stuck in traffic with my new Chinese homies. Just goes to show you that when you are in China, you had better leave your impatience in your suitcase. It’s a hard habit to break, but it’s one that’s necessary if you want to do any sort of business here.

Speaking of business… I meet the interns in Chengdu tomorrow evening. I hope they are as excited as I am to get back to the research.