Of fire, mountains, and nirvana

After last weekend's protein purification marathon, this week has been less labwork but no less busy. First a few photos from last Saturday's trek up the Mt. Cargill track.



Holiday parties of various kinds have occupied a large amount of my time the past several days. On Wednesday we had drinks and snacks at Carrington where I met a number of new summer students. Logan and Henry in particular were very welcoming and insisted that I come camping with them on a deserted beach a few hundred kilometers to the south. I said I would be "keen." I got the impression these Otago students really like to have fun, with alcohol taking center stage perhaps moreso than it does at Williams. The next evening we all went to dinner at one of the four Thai restaurants in town with the exact same menu but different names: Thai Hanoi, Thai Kar Tom, Thai Land (ha), and Thai Over (this evening's choice). Santa Claus arrived and dished out some $5 presents to folks who had brought something to exchange, and then we headed to someone's apartment and watched a fire poi shoe by Logan, who runs a pyrotechnics business called "Highly Flammable." He explained to me how fire breathing and fire eating work. In fire breathing, one spews refined jet fuel out of their mouth, like someone spitting out wine in the movies, while holding a match to it. In fire eating, one positions one's throat completely vertical such that the heat from the flame rises out of the mouth. Wet mucus lining the throat and mouth protects against burning in the short term. And to extinguish the flame, one closes one's mouth and the flame goes out immediately due to lack of oxygen. A couple photos from the show:
I'm hoping to buy a pair of poi myself (the glow kind to begin). After the fire show, we danced until 3 am at two clubs playing non-disco music, which was quite fun.

Friday was the Biochemistry Department Christmas social. The highlight was playing a game called "Heads or Tails" to win Cadbury's chocolate. The department chair and an assistant flipped two coins, and everyone in the group of sixty or seventy placed their hands either both on their head, both on their "tail," or one on each. If you guessed the flips, then you remained in the game, and the last one standing won. Of course the best strategy is to always put one hand on your head and one hand on your tail, since that gives you a 50% chance of being correct (heads tails or tails heads) while the other options give you only a 25% chance each. So every flip I used this strategy, but after several games I didn't win a thing, leaving me quite annoyed.

Today is Saturday and I just returned from another tramp on the Pineapple Track, my second journey there this week. This time around I was hiking with two Chinese, Jenny and Spike, who I had a great time with. As Jenny is Buddhist, I learned her views on reincarnation and karma and how the ultimate goal is to reach nirvana, which is a state of mind rather than a place. Since she believes that every living thing has a spirit living within it, she is vegetarian and does her best to minimize harm to all creatures; she walks around grass, for example, to avoid crushing insects (grass is too small a plant to harbor spirits, but other larger plants do contain them). Buddhism is a very flexible philosophy (and not a religion, per se); the important thing is to find one's own way. So there are Buddhists who don't believe in reincarnation or are not vegetarian. I told her that I would be very interested to read some books on Buddhism and she recommended one by an Australian author who writes on adapting the philosophy to everyday life.

At the top of Flagstaff Mountain we stood on top of a geodesic marker and snapped photos with my new waterproof and shockproof camera (to be seen next post). On the way down we played the always entertaining "Pancakes or Waffles" in which one begins by choosing between the two breakfast items and eventually is forced with decisions such as "Being the first person on Mars" or "Curing cancer." When Jenny was asked "Have a healthy and happy family" or "Save 1,000 people from dying of malaria" she chose the latter option without hesitation. I found this fascinating because a few days before, while on that same track with a couple non-Buddhists, a firm consensus was reached that there was nothing more important than being in a happy family with a loving spouse and children. Jenny explained that the people she helped would all be part of her family. For Spike, being not religious, money was most important, except when offered with the prospect of a supermodel wife.

After coming off the mountain, we returned to town in a light rain, which must come at some point during a walk near Dunedin, and Spike showed us to his favorite Chinese restaurant where we feasted on mushroom and bean soup, tofu and vegetables, and whole fish with onion. There I learned more about Chinese culture and language and how Asians in general tend to be very reserved with emotion, such that hugging and saying things like "I love you," even in private, are generally not done. My education in chopstick usage was also continued, although my hands were somewhat frozen after the wet and chilly walk so I seemed to have made negative progress in that department. Jenny insisted that it is bad karma to leave grains of rice in one's bowl, so they had a good time of it as I made a fool of myself for a quarter of an hour.