I'm back in Taipei; going to karaoke tonight (whee!!!!!!!!!!) and flying back to LA tomorrow night, which means I should arrive sometime on the evening of the 17th--a negative nine hour flight, if anyone's counting. It'll be nice to be in the US again (if it hasn't completely fallen apart since I left)--I do like it here, but I find the foreign language thing is wearing on me, and also I'm desperately craving time to work alone. How sad is that? The next four days after my return will be taken up with writing the report for Ge 122 and for my SURF, and then driving to SF for the weekend, and then launching into Rotation madness for a week and all I want is to be alone.

While I always suspected that I was one of those people who couldn't be socially on all the time, this trip has made me realize it even more, that at least a part of me is happy when alone with time to think for myself. During all previous trips it's been different--in Australia and 120 last year, I slept in my own sleeping bag or in my own tent, and had a fair amount of time just to think, or work on my own in the field. Here, we've been working in groups of four, and sharing rooms with three other people, and every meal is with others. I worked about 14 hours a day for the whole time, and there was one day when I was about to break down because I was mentally burned out and I didn't want to see anyone else in my group. It's not that I hate the people--I do find their presence enjoyable, for the most part--but literally spending 24 hours a day with people (sharing a double bed at night) just appears to be against my nature right now. The few bits of spare time I've had, I haven't wanted to write postcards, but to think of my stack, or read (Down one 1100 page novel so far since leaving, now at work on a second), or something that isn't talking about the field area, the food, the culture, or the others on the trip.

I like Taiwan, but again, I think I've been spoiled by the deserts of home. Everything here is covered in jungle; outcrops are few and far between and are often not in the least bit helpful. I have about 70 points saved in my GPS, and only half of those are telling. My photos send to look fairly unimpressive and like Yet Another Conglomerate or Terrace Deposit. On the other hand, despite the crappy exposure here, I like neotectonics and am now seriously considering doing future work in the field. We'll see how grad school applications go, but it's nice to be able to see rapid uplift, or fault scarps, or something concrete about what happened recently. But I also have more in common with Edward Abbey than I realized--I like being alone in the desert. Plants may be green and happy looking, and there may be fields brimming over with exotic fruits, but I long for vegetation that is blatantly unfriendly, rather than invitingly verdant and leafy and which proceeds to leave my knee a piece of work when I have to crawl up a hillside of it to find Yet Another Conglomerate or Terrace Deposit and three days later, I'm still covered in a million scratches and a rash on my legs. This is not to mention the time two days ago when we went looking for one particular location, tried to hike down a canyon, found the only way was walking down a stream, hopped over rocks for half a kilometer, found the cliff with a lovely exposure but it was across a deep pool. The options? Swim in chest-high water to get there, or to bushwhack through sawgrass over my head only to find an impassable maze of bamboo and other tall vegetation. My solution: Try and look from the side, then take a step onto what appears to be more plants, but which fails, and I fall into the water up to my waist and am wet like that for the rest of the day, squelchy boots and all. My conclusion: Why wasn't a machete recommended on the packing list?

Meredith, you can keep your plants.