The Chinese Express

When I titled this posting "The Chinese Express" I did not mean to refer to any local restaurant I frequent here in St. Louis (although I do like to frequent restaurants). Instead I am referring to riding the Metrolink in the morning and evening. Now that I ride it all the time, I noticed the one language I hear spoken on the train more than any others is not English, Spanish or "Ghetto" talk, it is good old Mandarin Chinese. For one thing, even though the Asian population on the train is substantially higher than the typical St. Louis percentage (maybe 10-20% of the train riding population), it is still definitely a minority of the passengers. However, there are more groups of speaking Chinese people than there are typical groups of communicating English speaking passengers. Even obviously "together" non-Chinese groups often sit there silently, whereas the groups of Chinese passengers are more likely to speak to one another. Why is this? And why does such a large Asian population ride the Metrolink? Is it simply because we are all cheap Wash U employees and students who do not want to pay for either the expensive Danforth campus parking or the even pricier Medical campus parking? Or are Asians more environmental or stronger proponents of public transportation? Or are many of them transplants from New York, Chicago or San Francisco where they are used to using public transportation? (I am not!) Or do more Asians who work at Wash U all happen to live in Clayton, Richmond Heights, Brentwood and other areas more accessible to Metrolink stops? Whatever the reason, I definitely have never been the lone Asian on the Metrolink. Maybe when I retire I should sell Bento lunch boxes on the train like in Japan!

On a completely unrelated topic here is a link to our department's Interstellar Dust Analogues web site including our IDALS public spectral database. If you wondered what the people in my department work on that they would hire someone as geeky as me, well, you cannot get much geekier than that!