Real Classes, Week Two

So this week has been another (the second!) of what is becoming the routine. Basically, except for Tuesdays, when I have early class, I get up around 9, eat a breakfast of a fried egg, mianbao, and milk with sugar (their idea, not mine!) (though I definitely have had that idea before). Then I go to class from 10-12, which is reliably great fun, and I think productive. After that I come home for lunch, then xiuxi for a while, usually either reading or doing internet if I can find a wifi network from my room. Then hopefully I have something to do in the afternoon, and go out again for a few hours before coming home for dinner at 7, and more reading/internet before bed. It’s not exactly crammed chock-full, but I’m still managing to feel tired, which is a little strange.

Highlights from this week:

--I have an internship! We’ll see how it develops (the last one didn’t go that well) but I’m pretty optimistic: it’s with a company that has two employees but lots and lots of projects. They’re the ones who made GoKunming, which I like and use a ton, and they also work on Fodor’s Yunnan Guidebook, and they do some consulting stuff too, and have about four other websites. And when I talked to them they said point-blank that they have lots of good stuff going, but it’s way more than the two of them can handle and they need help from anyone they can find who’s motivated and capable, regardless of prior experience/qualifications/anything else. That’s basically exactly what I was hoping to find: turns out people like that who also speak fluent English are pretty rare in Kunming. So I’m going to try to meet those criteria as best I can. The first thing they asked me is whether I would like to go on an expenses paid week-long trip to the jungle south of here to cover an off-road rally. This was over the phone, before we’d even met each other. Good first impression, though unfortunately I had already made plans.

What I’m actually going to be doing is working on a site of theirs called China City Listings, which is an attempt to make a yellow pages for all the major cities/tourist spots in China. Check it out! (and create an account, and click on lots of ads). It looks pretty cool: very slick interface, with maps that have pins in them :-). But it’s still not very widely used, so it’s going to be my job to try and fix that. If you have thoughts for things that would make it better, let me know. I’m excited.

--Yesterday, I had my first big experience using Chinese as a common language. It wasn’t much, but it was still cool. When I came here, one of the pluses was that Kunming is a center for SE Asians learning Chinese. There’s a lot of them interested in speaking Hanyu, turns out, and this is the closest major city to most SE Asian countries. But so far I haven’t connected much with them, mostly since they don’t speak English, unlike the Europeans. But yesterday that changed! I met a girl from Indonesia at the movie shoot Monday (see below), and ran into her yesterday, and she invited me to eat dinner with two of her friends from Thailand. So the four of went and ate jiaozi, and talked to each other in Chinese, which none of us speak confidently (I didn’t say that the conversation itself was particularly stimulating: “Where are you from? Meiguo. And you? etc etc..”). Yay lingua franca! I guess I realize that this experience is pretty common among people who aren’t Americans, but I think this is the first time I’ve done it, and it was pretty neat.

--This year is my school’s 70th anniversary, so on Monday they shot a movie with a bunch of the foreign students. It was fun: they had us drink tea, and listen to Chinese traditional instruments, and do taichi, and sit next to the principle of the school, and took movies of it, which they’re going to compile for the film. They said they would give us copies; I’ll try to post it when they do. And the principle part was pretty sweet: I’m not sure if he’s the head of the foreign studies institute or the entire university, but he seemed important and we got to ask him real questions while they were taking footage, since they didn’t need sound. Good stuff.

Those were the highlights of the week. Nice. Now tomorrow a friend of mine from Swat is coming, and on Saturday we’re taking off for points northwest. China’s National Day is 10/1, and the country, including universities, gets the whole week off. So we’re headed up to Dali, Lijiang, and Shangri-la (I bet you thought it was fictional, didn’t you? Turns out it was, until in 2001 a city official in Zhongdian had a brainwave…), all of which are up in the mountains (BIG mountains—6000+ meters = 19-20,000 feet) near the Yunnan-Tibet border. I don’t know that I’ll be writing much, but I’ll definitely take lots of pictures and try to do it justice when we get back. Sweet.

In other news, China just launched its third manned rocket.

Some pictures from the weekend.

I don't know why this is acting up, but it's frustrating... Here's two pictures..

Dian Chi, seen from Xi Shan

The restaurant where we ate

This Weekend

For some reason picture uploading isn't working right now, so I'll try again soon.

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This weekend featured two very different but very good days, which combined to give a view of China from two directions.On Saturday, I went to Xi Shan, the Western Hills, with two of my friends from Frisbee. This was the Rugged Western Traveler day: they both are super cool and pretty hardcore. Speak Chinese, have been living here for several years—actually they were friends in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, for a year or so before coming to Kunming and both complain that Kunming is “too easy” to be the real China, given it’s nice weather, mild pollution, friendly authorities, and many English speakers. The traveler method involves exploring random places ‘off the beaten track’ as well as big sights, being really smart and aware, talking to locals in their language, use public transportation, but always sticking together and talking as a group of three Americans.

After taking two local buses to the foot of the hills, which stick up on the western side of Dianchi Lake (Kunming is on it’s north end), we hitched a ride up in a minibus and started hiking. It was pretty nice: the mountains are incredibly steep and spectacular, and are forested thickly enough that it was possible to hear the absence of city/people noise for the first time since I’ve been here. Unfortunately it was a bit hazy, so pictures of the view wouldn’t turn out, but the sight was pretty incredible, looking out 3000 ft above a huge lake.  And the hiking was great!  We got out into woods, and it felt like we'd left the city (we had) and it was really quiet--no people noise at all.  What!!?--and natural.  That was nice, and needed after a month (officially, today) here.

My comments about silence aside, for the most part the mountains are populated. There are temples and pavilions scattered all through them, which made good exploration targets, as well as a cable car and the tomb of Nie’er, the person who composed China’s National Anthem. He was Kunming ren, so at some point they created a masoleum for him. This is the March of the Volunteers, so it was done in the ‘concrete masses’ style:

The other main population in the hills is balloon game vendors. For some reason, the leisure of activity of choice in the Xi Shan seems to be popping balloons with airsoft guns. Scattered all across the mountain faces were people with sets of 50 balloons taped to a sheet and four or five airsoft rifles which could be used to pop them balloons for a nominal fee. It was quite the deployment: we were on fairly out of the way trails, some of which probably didn’t get more than a few other users during the day, and still every hundred yards or so there would be a balloon popper. I’m not exaggerating by much: I think we probably saw upwards of thirty over the course of our hike.We hiked around to a couple of temples, then found our way to a town in a saddle between two peaks, where we had a lunch of miantiao. These were I think my first noodles in China, so were sort of overdue. They were fine and came with a spicy pickled vegetable, which was quite good. Plus it was a good house restaurant experience.

After that we hiked all the way down the mountain on a combination of very steep roads and wonderful backwoods paths. We stopped to see one of the temples, which was huge and amazing: perfectly tranquil, with incredible carvings and statues.

Like all good temples, Taihua has a fish pond.

Worship.

When we finally made it to the bottom, we hopped back on the bus and returned to town. This was one of the best “traveler” days I’ve had so far: saw great sites, walked through beautiful forests, ate in somebody’s front yard, and had good conversation with two nice and interesting friends.

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Sunday was the local day. A friend of my host mom’s (the same one who hosted the big party a few weeks ago) took me on what I thought was a morning trip to the park, but turned out to be much, much more.

We met at the bus station outside my school and took the bus to Jin Dian (the Golden/Bronze Temple that I went to the week before last). On the way we had some pretty good conversation: she’s an English teacher, but doesn’t actually speak very much, so we had a good combo of Chinese and English. I like her a ton: she’s really nice and was excited to show me all sorts of Chinese Wen Hua, which was great. Plus she just has an air of an older woman who’s perfectly in control—kind of ladylike, maybe?

So that was fun. Then once we got to the park we met up with a friend of hers and her son. The son was 14, and thus had studied a fair amount of Yingyu in school (he spoke it better than the teacher). We bonded over the fact that we both had played Red Alert 2, which made me happy :-). The four of us then set about doing a more thorough tour of the park than I had done by myself. This included some museums about bronze work in ancient Yunnan (which I could now understand..) and lots of walking on small out of the way paths. It turns out it’s a really beautiful and serene park, with some wonderful corners where all you can see are trees and sky and all you can hear are some trickling streams and a bamboo flute off in the distance. That was a sort of surreal ‘this is China’ moment, actually.

We finished with the park by about noon, but little did I know that the day was actually just beginning. We took the bus back to the house of the friend and her son, where we had tea. This apartment was a pretty good example of something that I’ve noticed several times now: the run-down, not particularly nice, kind of dirty apartment building that suddenly yields to spotless, incredibly tastefully decorated, bright, airy actual apartments. My house isn’t quite this: the building isn’t that bad, and the apartment isn’t that good. But most of the other places I’ve been have been just beautiful.

Anyway, we had pu’er cha, which is a Yunnan specialty. This meant we got to try out their cha table, which was an amazing piece of knotted wood with different levels carved into it to put cups and plates on and drain excess water from. It also meant that we got snacks: all sorts of

 fruits and nuts (the highlight for me was the peanuts, which hadn’t been prepared in the same

 way as at home, so tasted much more like actual plants, a little bit like sprouts), some sweet bread, and the highlight, which was a sort of baozi from Sichuan that had an extra sticky and chewy outside with pork and eggs in the middle.

Tea!  At an amazing tea store, with incredible tea accessories!

After the tea we said good bye to the son, who had school (on a Sunday, yes, and actually apparently his school doesn’t get the National Day break that I thought was required by law. Intense), and the three of us kept exploring. Our next stop was a new Bird and Flower Market, which I actually liked a lot. This was on the outskirts of town, by the park and their house, and I doubt it was more than a few years old, but they’d done a superb job of recreating classic Chinese architecture (at least to this supremely untrained Western eye). It was really beautiful, and filled with shops selling all sorts of vaguely Chinese things: tea tables, jade carvings, furniture, embroidery, porcelain, and birds and flowers too. It’s kind of funny, but this was probably the closest I’ve felt to what China must have been like a couple of centuries ago, before either modern technology or foreign influence. It was really nice.

We had one more stop left, and that was dinner. Over the course of the day, it came out that I had not tried Guoqiao Mixian, ‘Across the Bridge Rice Noodles.’ When I was reading about this place, I got the sense that these were a huge deal: they’re mentioned three or four times in the Lonely Planet, even getting their own gray box. But since I’ve been here I hadn’t seen that much evidence of them, and my host family made no mention (I suspect that they don’t like noodles. That works fine with me). So yesterday I got to try them out.

Guoqiao Mixian.

The basic idea is sort of like a twist on hotpot or fondue: you cook things in a broth at your table. But this time, each person gets their own broth, which comes in an earthenware bowl at an exceedingly high temperature. Each person then gets a selection of things to put in the broth, including the noodles of course, but also several different types of meat, lots of vegetables, and even a raw egg (I’m not sure what kind of bird it was from, but it was only about a third the size of a chicken). You dump all these things in the broth, with I think some order to them: egg first, then the raw meat, then the vegetables, and finally the noodles. Stir it and let it cook a bit, and then start picking the now-well-done morsels out and drinking the soup. It works pretty well, especially the soup, which now has flavors of all the different things you put in it. Yummy yummy yummy, and now I’ve officially been to Kunming.

After our dinner we had a nice stroll through a market street and then went our separate ways. It was a pretty great day, probably even beating the sights of the day before. This was the local version: hang out with people, let them show you their stuff even if it’s not super high-powered. Don’t worry as much about letting English happen (though I still tried to make the effort), and just have fun getting to know them. Very pleasant.

Both methods are good, and I think that getting combinations like this is really nice and gives a better picture than either could by itself. See the sights, and the people.

Zhongguo pengyou!

I had two pretty eventful days this weekend, so at some point I'll hopefully have some nice detailed exploring posts with a few pics (nothing very good though, bc it was hazy and bad light :-(. But I wanted to write now because I just made a friend almost entirely in Chinese!!!!  Woot! As far as I can tell he's a computer student who came over to fix the family machine (which was made before he was born.  Not actually).  We talked about where I was from, and what sports we liked--both do badminton and pingpang qiu (not actually much of a surprise here), and what we studied, and how long I would be here, and other stuff too, and I only used the dictionary a little and he almost never switched to English and didn't get frustrated by having to repeat things too many times.  Very cool.

Also tonight I got an entire hard-boiled egg in hidden in a mooncake. Ooof--wasn't expecting that.  Plus, on mooncakes, check out this week's Economist .  I didn't see the coupons, but the packaging definitely gets crazy, and boxes of maybe six pastries would go for hundreds of yuan.

Cool.

An Afternoon Walk

This place can be pretty inspiring sometimes. No captions, really, but these are all from my walk this afternoon.

Life today

Other things from today:

--Basketball! I knew lan qiu was hugely popular, judging by how the courts outside my window are occupied from 7 am until 10.30 at night, but I didn't realize how big it was as a spectator sport until today. I walked by a tournament of sorts that was happening in the center of the campus. There were eight or so hardcore teams complete with uniforms and referees, but the more impressive thing was the 2-300 spectators lining the sidelines elbow to elbow. Lots of cheering and big drums playing, and I think this is a pretty common occurrence, nothing special. Yao Ming's influence, or is this what got him playing in the first place?

--Junk food. I've been doing well at living on about 10 RMB a day so far, which is good until you consider that I'm not paying for food or lodging or entertainment mostly out of that, and am spending it all on junkfood. There's a store that sells cookies and chocolates right on my way to class, and I'm getting pretty familiar with the owners (after one bad run where I heard 'liu' for 'liang' and gave them four extra kuai, which were patiently returned..). The main question is whether to go for Dove dark chocolate or some Chinese brands that are 1/3 the price but a very different product. At the moment I'm leaning towards Dove, since the other ones are good but sort of waxy and a lot harder to eat a little of. I figure if I get 3-4 fixes out of one bar versus eating a whole Chuy bar at once. Other junkfood is ice cream, packaged versions of which can go for about 20 cents, and variations on rice cakes and cookies, which are incredible. And for not sweet there are carts everywhere which do different kinds of kebabs, and roasted corn, and squares of goat cheese with chili on them, and yummy yummmmy....

--Yesterday I got my first modeling job offer! Ho yeah.  But I turned it down even though it was 400 kuai since it was all day Saturday plus the training on Wednesday, which would only have been about 20 kuai an hour and sacrificing a weekend. Still, I might go for it if I get another one, since I doubt I'll get the chance back home.

--I had a dinner meeting today that I was a little late for, so I was walking sort of quickly, but I was impressed that people walk a lot more slowly than I'm used to. Probably a good idea, and something that I should work to adopt.

--Related to that, I just tried the cheeseburger at Salvador's and it was amazing :-).  A friend from frisbee is from Kunming but goes to school in the US and is considering transferring to Swat, so she took me out to eat to ask questions about it.  Small world.  We went for western, so I had a HUGE mushroom onion cheeseburger and an oreo float on the side. Cathartic. 

I think that's all I've got.

Waiguo Ren

So in the past couple of weeks I’ve spent a fair amount of time with various segments of the foreigner population of Kunming (this has been to some extent by design: since I’m living with a family and taking one-on-one classes, finding people to hang out with when I want to be able to understand requires a fair amount of effort. It’s actually a lot harder than I expected--I think that unless they have some context with you, people here don’t like to make new Western friends. This has been documented, and it’s legit—that’s not why you come to China. But it’s frustrating for me looking for anyone who will speak English to me without furtively looking around for other more interesting people. Part of that is probably me being shy, but there’s definitely no acknowledgment if you walk by somebody, and most of the conversations I’ve had have yielded zero desire for continuation on the part of the other party. Both of these are definitely more negative here than in the US, which is discouraging).

There are a lot of waiguo ren around—1800+ are registered on GoKunming (an amazing, amazing resource for living here), and those are only people who speak English and want to use discussion boards. The basic overview is that most people are single and under 35. They’re split between students, who are normally here for about a year specifically to study, and what I’m going to call ‘lifers’ who have been around for a long time and don’t have definite plans for return. They seem to find work here and there, some translating, some teaching English, lots working for NGO’s that help relieve rural minority poverty, and some doing various sorts of businessy stuff. I don’t think there’s any really high powered businesspeople like in Shanghai or Hong Kong because this is Kunming, which doesn’t have exactly the same potential for monetary gain. Then there’s a few older couples who have come here to take breaks from life or to teach English or to live cheaply. Countrywise, I haven’t seen very many Latinos or South Asians and only a few Africans, but other than that there’s a good spread. Some more specific notes:

--Community centers. It’s funny because there’s one road that has all the foreign establishments (turning onto it, the ratio jumps from about 1/500 to 1/3), but to a large extent each country has its own restaurant. So there’s Salvador’s, which is run by Americans and has amazing ice cream and apparently cheeseburgers and lots of friendly outgoing people who speak English as their native language—the first time I went there I got into a conversation with possibly the most stereotypical American I’ve ever met. He was from California, worked in the movie business, and had a jovial, prosperous, straightforward manner that I think could be termed Reaganesque. This was notable because I didn’t have to initiate the conversation, and it lasted longer than it took for him to quickly chug his drink and move on (see above). Then two doors up there’s a pizza place owned by Italians, and around the corner there’s the French Café, where I do hear actual French spoken whenever I walk by, and further on there’s the Prague Café. There are also a few Indian restaurants, though that’s one ethnicity that I haven’t seen around very much, and several Korean restaurants. It’s nice, though, because even on foreigner street most of the restaurants are interspersed with Chinese restaurants, and at night there’s a fair amount of exchange among all of them.

--Sort of along the same lines, I’m impressed at the extent to which groups form of very similar foreigners. There’s some overlap among classmates, since that’s not done by nationality or anything, but once class is over people split into national groups. Not surprising with the other Asians, who want to talk to people they can understand, but I’ve also seen groups of for example Eastern Europeans talking to each other in English. Interesting. Then there’s the longer-term expats who I think are grouped by when they arrived—when I went to learn about my internship (which I haven’t been to for a week..oops..) I ended up spending time with the owner of the company (which has six employees) and his friends. They came from all over the English-speaking world and Western Europe, but had all been in Kunming for several years and China total for about 10. My favorite example of this is the Ultimate Frisbee group, which except for the one Chinese guy who set up the thing is basically composed of people who have graduated from liberal arts colleges within the last three years (seriously: Macalester, Whitman, Oberlin, Georgetown, Emory [ok, last two not quite, but still], Earlham, Swat. I think those are all the schools that have been named).

--Other thing that I’m realizing but can’t really comment on: it’s definitely a very different experience being a foreigner here and being a black foreigner here. I think there are six black people in this city: one of them is my friend, from Zambia, and the other five go to Yunnan Da Xue (the other university). I went exploring with my friend Chiyombwe last week and we got several looks and points a minute. I don’t get any reaction at all when I’m walking around alone.

Random thoughts..

Not much new to report these last couple of days, but at the moment I'm excited about studying.  All yesterday and the day before was off of school because of Zhong Qiu Chie, which was a little long--for some reason I was absolutely exhausted, but still had two days of nothing but lounging and playing Ultimate, which is a long time.  (The holiday itself was very nice: my host family and I had a wonderful dinner of jiaozi [dumplings--I ate ~20], and then went for a walk in the moonlight and talked about our families and how we missed them.  This is a holiday that's supposed to be spent with/thinking about family, and their son is far away as well.  So we had very nice reciprocity and tried to fill each other's voids. Then we came back home and ate round things: apples, pears, oranges, walnuts, and mooncakes.  Pleasant).

So today I started on my new and final schedule, with 4 hours of class this morning.  Then after lunch I took a nap and studied on my own for a while: I'm going to learn this!!! Hopefully. So far I've been depressed/impressed by how slow it's going--hard, different language--so I'm trying to focus a little more.  That was a good feeling, sort of reminded me of Swat.   And then I went to this Chinese club (or rather they appeared where I was sitting) and got some nice practice talking, which made me happy.  Also got a language exchange out of it, so now on Fridays I'm going to talk in English for one hour and Chinese for another.  That was kind of funny: the girl I was talking to said "you know, this is good, but Chinese club is hard because it's different people every time. You should maybe set up a language exchange with somebody, so they can prepare for you." Hinthinthinthinthint.  So I asked her how, and miraculously she was free!  Still, this is good: I still don't have enough of a vocabulary to practice with people who don't speak some English, so the best thing is people who have studied lots of English, so know words, but don't speak it fluently enough that we automatically revert to it.  AND on my way home I went by a bakery and they had stuff made out of the mochi rice flour chewy substance that I very much like.  So I'm in a good mood.

Unrelated thing: some people know of The Superest, which is a high-powered version of Kill the Platypus (if anyone knows of that, you should tell me).  I was looking at them today and they mentioned Zumbro Falls as a city in danger of being destroyed by Wee Kong.  That's 30 min from my house!  It has one gas station and a bridge and five other buildings! I've canoed through there.  And driven through the Christmas lights thing.  Weird.. 

Anyway, this has been very scattered and not particularly informative.  I hopefully have more serious stuff coming sometime... 

Escaping Kunming! Not...

Today was day one of a three-day weekend we got because of the Mid-Autumn Festival, one of the big three Chinese holidays. This is a time for families to get together, hang out under the full moon, and eat mooncakes and other round things. For those of you unfamiliar with them, mooncakes are worth checking out. They’re sort of like pastries, only way more serious and dense. There are lots of different flavors, ranging from pineapple to candied ham, but to give you an idea the first one that I had was almond-flavored, and basically it was a 3-inch by 1-inch circle of Marzipan with a thin pastry shell on the outside. Pretty nice.

Anyway, because of the festival we don’t have class on Monday, so it seemed like a good time to get out of town. However, as sometime seems to happen, the plans kept shrinking. My first hope was to go to Yuanyang, which is a photographer mecca about 7hrs bus south of here known for its absolutely spectacular rice terraces. Later on I was hoping to go to Dali, about 5hrs west of here, which is an ancient city sitting on a lake surrounded by huge mountains (also home to a Swattie!!!). But I wanted to go with someone, and my candidate didn’t want to do 5hrs in a bus for just two days. So after some conferencing, we decided to go to Shilin (literally Stone Forest; think Bryce with more green plants), about two hours south of here, and spend just one night. But then a party got planned for tonight, so we made it a day trip.

That takes us up to this morning. At 8.30 sharp, I met Aly (my partner in exploration, a girl from the class I just permanently vacated, originally from Calgary) in front of the school. We got a taxi to the long-distance bus station on the other side of town, and proceeded to approach likely-seeming strangers to say “Shilin?” and get a point in some direction. Eventually we got to someone who answered us not with a point but by taking us inside and relieving us of 40 kuai each, exactly like the Lonely Planet said.

So far so good. But then instead of taking us to the minibus sitting outside, she lead us across the street to another bus station, where we waltzed through the ticket area to the place where the buses were parked. However, instead of getting on a bus here for Shilin, they let us sit a while. Then a new person came over and told us that to get to Shilin we would have to pay 30 kuai each. We were sort of taken aback, especially since our first person hadn’t given us a receipt (lesson noted). But the original saleswoman was still there, and intervened on our behalf. Unfortunately, the end result of this intervention was not a seat on a bus but the return of our original 80 kuai and instructions to go to a third bus station, down the street by the train station.

We made it there and after some confusion in which we were told there were no more tickets to Shilin we got through on our second try (five minutes later, at the same window) and scored tickets for now only 27 kuai each. Nice. But they were for 10.45, which left us a little more than an hour. We went and ate some baozi, then came back around 10.30, found the stall where the bus would load, and contentedly began to wait.

And wait. And wait. Around 11.00, with no bus to Shilin in sight, we and the other passengers were shifted back indoors. We got lucky to sit next to a couple of Shilinren who were very nice and great for language exchange. So we had a good time talking to them, at least. But when the bus still hadn’t showed at 11.30, we decided to finally cut our losses and bail for the day—at two hours each way, we would only have gotten about four hours at Shilin itself, and it apparently has a pretty steep entrance fee. Next weekend. (about 10 minutes after we left, we got a call from the couple telling us the bus had arrived and we could still make it if we ran. They were so nice!).

Original plan foiled, we decided to make a day of exploring instead. I was a little sad at first—I’ve been exploring Kunming for the last three weeks, and while I like it a lot I’m starting to wonder if it is indeed possible to leave—but it turned out great. We started walking aimlessly around and bumped into a market street (this is as opposed to a market. In my lexicon, market street means lots of people with bikes and cars full of fruits, veggies, and chickens who have parked and set up shop. Market is a little more permanent). Had a good time exploring that, looking at all the beautiful produce:

Then we went downtown and got shaved ice, which was heavenly after lots of heat and stress. After that went to the market (see above), where Aly bought sunglasses and I was tempted yet again by these gourd instruments they have here: a gourd with a flute coming out the bottom. I think I’ll get one in the pretty near future. Also by some sculptures I saw: various military vehicles—planes, tanks, and artillery—made out of spent bullet casings. Next we walked over to my favorite Green Lake Park and got more cold beverages. While we drank (mine was a variation on a float: either Sprite or mineral water with chocolate ice cream in it. Quite good) we had a great conversation. She’s done a lot of stuff: basically every big trip I’ve done for 2-3 months, she’s done for a year. Talked a lot about traveling and the impact/issues it creates with the host communities. Good to keep in mind.

Recharged, we explored Green Lake Park some more. This was great: there were as always lots of musical acts around the park, but they seemed somehow of much higher quality today. We saw two different kinds of folk dancing:

Ribbon folk dancing. These guys were really cool, and they had a whole choir of live music backing them up.

Hat folk dancing. This was more chill, with a boombox and anyone with a hat allowed to join in.

Then we got into a conversation with an amazing guy. He was 84, and remembered very well the American presence here in WWII (this is something I would like to learn more about; all I know is that when the Japanese invaded China, the Allies had troops here—I think a lot of airplanes—to help the Chinese fight back). That might have been how he learned English, which he spoke amazingly well. It was touching to see how much he still liked and appreciated America because of what we did way back then, to the point where he consciously chose to imitate the American accent instead of the British one. Amazing, spot-on demonstration of the different ways to say ‘not’.

After many assurances of the importance of English as the ‘word of the world’ and the excellence of our Chinese (absolute bs; I think maybe complimenting pronunciation is seen as a good last resort when foreigners can’t speak worth anything) and three handshakes (I was very honored by this), we parted ways. Pretty soon we came across another music act: this one was a violin, one of those one-stringed, bowed instruments (I really should know the word for these; my apologies), and a guitar, but played horizontally like a zither. They were amazing. At first it was just really pretty music, but later on they maybe noticed us and started playing things like “Auld Lang Syne” and “Edleweiss”. We both sang on that one :-).

Horizontal Hold (hah! Anyone? No.) style guitar

We saw some other cool stuff as well, which deserves commenting on. People flying kites, for one:

And the other is one of my favorite things so far. How’d you like to drive one of these?


This pilot is a little older than average, but that was my best shot. I really like these cars: kids pay some money and drive around inflated animal cars, and the best part is that they play Christmas carols the whole time!! I think that those songs are associated with amusement or carnivals or something here, because I’ve heard them most times that I see carnival rids (which are pretty frequent: at the park, at the zoo, on the street…). I’m all for this: I like the melodies of Christmas songs a lot, and they deserve more than one month of air time.

That was the day. Not bad, as it turned out, and it was good to be exploring with company for once. Maybe next week I’ll get out of town, or else the week after that is our vacation, so I’ll hopefully at least make it then.

Continued Exploration (sorry, this one is super delayed)

Hi again--

It's been a sort of slow week for posts, mostly because of business getting classes (and internships! possibly) straight combined with my somewhat limited internet schedule. So I've got a couple of posts that I wrote in Word earlier this week to upload now. In this case, "today" means Wednesday, September 10.


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More exploring.

This afternoon, since I didn’t have classes or anything, I went on a new explore. This one involved an old Taoist temple on the edge of town, and it was exciting because it involved not one but TWO buses, as well as asking my host mother for directions. Pretty intense stuff. But it all went smoothly, which was a big confidence booster. And I got to ride on a double-decker bus all the way across town and back, which was lots of fun. I’m impressed that this is a pretty big city.

The entrance to Golden Temple Park

The Golden Temple is on top of a mountain in a giant park. It’s called “Golden” because the whole thing is made out of bronze. But that’s ahead of the story. There’s a big entrance gate at the bottom of the hill, and after paying admission you enter the park, suddenly surrounded by forest. Very tranquil, which is something that I’m learning to value a lot here. But you can’t spend too long enjoying it, because the temple is at the very top of the mountain, up several hundred really steep steps connected by equally steep paths. When you finally make it, you step into the threshold through the Third Heaven Gate (got the hanzi for that one by myself :-), and are greeted by… ice cream merchants!! Very, very well placed, but not really what I expected. Still, I definitely bought one and set about seeing the temple.

Lots of pathways..

It’s really more of a complex than one single building. There is the bronze temple itself, which is about 20ft on a side and has a lot of really beautiful statues etc. within, but branching out from all sides are other, subsidiary temples, gardens, museums, and lots of big, old walls. Probably my favorite part was the bell tower, a little further up the hill:

This was by far the biggest building, and the only one that stuck up above the trees to give a view of the city. That was amazing—you could really see all the big buildings spreading out over a huge area, bounded by green mountains on all sides:


This is a pretty place. Doubly so from there, where the view was bordered by Taoist architecture and pine trees:


Also in the tower there were two bells (!). The main one is no longer active, though it’s gigantic—supposedly 5 meters around, which looked about right—but the smaller one (still huge: think Liberty Bell) was a Bell of Happiness, which you could ring using a fish-shaped clapper for two yuan. I did. You could get three rings for 5, though, which is what a lot of other tourists did (after I started the trend), so I hope I wasn’t missing something and one hit will be enough.

After walking around and getting my nature quota at least partially filled, I headed back down to the two buses and the city. Good day.

More Paralympics

So I don’t know what the coverage of the Paralympics is like in the US, but here they’re getting almost the same amount of airtime as the Olympics did (resolving the question of how long Olympic replays would last), which means I’m getting to see quite a bit of them (makes up for missing so much at tv-less Caltech). That’s praiseworthy in itself: these guys work just as hard and overcome obstacles that are at least as big as those facing the ‘main’ Olympians, but they generally don’t get anywhere near the fame and recognition, since people aren’t interested in watching them. It’s nice that here, at least, lots of people are watching. But I’ve also been blown away by the capacities that the athletes have developed. Last night was the woman’s wheelchair ping pong final, China v China of course, and both players were phenomenal—basically, wheelchair ping pong means you have to stay in one place more or less, and you’re sitting down, so no hitting the ball from above. That means smashing is sort of difficult, but these two women were unfazed, and getting all sorts of spin, reaching huge distances to return shots, and smashing somehow despite the terrible angle. Incredible.

Then today I saw some more: armless equestrian. They hold the reins in their teeth. Wow. Possibly the most impressive thing, though, has to be handless ping pong. The two athletes both had arms which stopped above the elbow, so they had rackets that strapped onto their stumps. To serve, they had to get the ball bouncing on the table, then catch it on their paddle, then throw it up from their paddle and hit it on the way down. And then play out the point with no wrists or fingers to help with spin or finesse, but they did it superbly. I’m totally impressed. Jia You!

(More pictures and exploration notes coming!)

Party Time!

Today my host mama had a party with some of her friends, and she took me along. It was probably the highlight of my time here so far.

I came running in from playing Frisbee at about 4.30, and we started getting ready. Took a shower, and then I got big points by volunteering to change into my nice shirt, which I don’t think they knew I had. They told me to go change, and my host mama started getting a gift ready. When I came out, she was hunched over the fish tank, net in one hand and a double plastic baggie in the other. She proceeded to corner and withdraw eight small goldfish and place them in the double plastic baggie, which she then hung on the doorknob so we wouldn’t forget it. I’ve never brought live fish as a present to a party before, but I think I might in the future.

Next we had to get there. We headed down the stairs from our apartment and went to the shed, where my host parents proceeded to tie our presents, which included a potted plant and a fleece comforter as well as the eight fish in the double plastic bag, to various handlebars and bicycle seats. This was my first time riding a bike in China, and it was quite the experience. After two weeks I now feel borderline comfortable crossing the street here (see Kate’s description. Note that if you're enjoying this blog you should definitely read hers: it's another Swattie, another Minnesotan, another study abroad in China), but a bicycle was a new level entirely. When you’re walking, you only are in the middle of traffic for limited amounts of time, and you can travel in packs with the other pedestrians to achieve some appearance of safety. But on a bicycle your fellow cyclists are enemies, not friends: get too close and you’ll both fall to the floor, where you’ll instantly be hit by three more bicycles, six motorbikes, two cars, and a bus. Plus, though two-wheelers usually have their own lane, this includes motorscooters going about four times the speed of a bike and coming on all sides from nowhere while honking incessantly. And crossing the roundabout was something else entirely. All this was especially harrowing for me as I was on my host father’s bicycle, which is the same size as the Huffy I had until fifth grade. And the nerves weren’t helped by the fact that she actually did hit at least two people during our trip. She’s supposed to be an expert!!

Eventually, though, we made it, and we had a wonderful time. We were visiting with three of my host mom’s oldest friends—they all were sent to the same village during the Cultural Revolution—it was really touching to see how fond they were of each other. At one point we went for a walk, and the sight of my mama and her old friend walking arm in arm down the street, oblivious to their surroundings, stirred emotions that I don’t feel frequently.

We sat and talked and drank tea for a while, and much of the conversation centered on me—I think my host mom was showing off a bit. I managed to do an okay job of answering their questions, helped in large part by the hostess, who is an English teacher. Mostly they wanted me to compare Zhongguo and Meiguo. I tried to keep things neutral, but stumbled on some of them: “Do people in the US really dislike China as much as we’ve heard they do?” Answer that one diplomatically and with acceptable nuance using only “China”, “the US”, “people”, “good”, “not”, and “say.”

Then we ate. And ate. And ate. It went as follows: first they brought out a bowl of broth with pieces of duck in it. We took those and put them in our bowls of la—spiciness—and ate them. Then they took a big bowl of vegetables and dumped them into the broth and let them cook for a while before fishing them out and eating them. Then repeat with pork and meatball kebabs, what I think were green rice noodles, cabbage, lettuce, slices of beef, mushrooms, and probably some other things I’m forgetting right now. Then, start the whole cycle over again, and go through two or three more times. It was sort of an overwhelming amount of food (I counted ten kebabs between my mama and me, and I don’t think we split them equally. And that was only one of the three kinds of meat), though each bite was of course heavenly. I got some respect for being able to take the la, though I had to make big pauses at some points: the one problem I still haven’t figured out with food here is that in any given meal, every dish is either temperature hot or spicy hot. So you start to eat, and pretty soon your mouth is on fire, and you can’t put it out because there’s nothing that can help you—you don’t even have water to drink, sino hot tea. Basically you just sweat and bear it until it subsides a bit, then dive back in.

About two-thirds of the way through dinner I was asked if I liked/wanted wine. Responded ‘yi dian dian’—this is the right answer to any question involving food—and was presented with about two shots worth of probably the strongest amber-colored liquid I’ve ever drunk. I took one tiny sip and my mouth exploded into fire, followed by my esophagus, and then my stomach. It was a type of rice wine which had been made by the hostess herself, and as far as I could tell part of the secret is that besides being strong alcohol it’s actually spicy (surprise! This is Yunnan!). So you get the burn two ways. Not something that I’d thought of before, but pretty amazing. I didn’t drink very much—see the second paragraph for why—but it was a really cool taste and experience.

All that was more than four hours ago now, but I’m still stuffed. Time to go to bed.

Paralympics Begin!

Part two of Beijing 2008.  I was just watching the opening ceremony, and I have to say that these keep getting weirder and weirder.  First opening ceremony was amazing, the closing ceremony was good but kind of strange, but I think this one was a little beyond me.  It was really short--only about 15 minutes of performance before the parade of nations--and basically consisted of a couple hundred of what I can only describe as teletubbies running around in a circle and then sitting down and playing 'parachute' with their capes.  A visually pleasing effect, but I couldn't help but thinking that it was more along the lines of some kindergarten extravaganza than an Olympic ceremony--like they weren't taking it that seriously.  Which I sort of wonder about, because I bet not getting taken seriously is something paralympic athletes have to deal with a lot. 

Two weeks in China!! Still feels ridiculously understated, but it's the same ridiculous understatement that I felt last week.  This may start going fast in the near future.. 

This Place Stinks!!!!

Only in the most literal of all possible senses.  Today was my first big pollution day, and I was sort of bowled over.  I spent the whole summer in LA, and nothing there compared to this: the whole place just smelled awful, and the sky was this not clouds but not sun grey, and it felt gross.. but mostly I just haven't had much experience in places where the air tastes bad like this. Part of it is probably that everyone smokes here, and there's a billion people in all the streets (hm... Maybe shouldn't use hyperbole here...), so that's not really about overarching pollution.

Made me appreciate that I'm glad to be here where we haven't had any days like this yet and not somewhere further east where they supposedly get them all the time (though we had decent luck in Shanghai, in part due to rain), and that there are a lot of things that we take for granted at home which we probably shouldn't.  Having to choose between clean air and enough food/good shelter/decent clothing isn't something that we need to do.

Green Lake Park Pics

Here are the photos from Green Lake Park, one of my favorite places nearby:

Looking over the waters of the lake

Closeup of lilypads

Practicing music! There's tons and tons of musicians here.

Bamboo is amazing stuff.

Nice bridge and buildings shot.

I think this is all for today. I'm about to go play ultimate frisbee, if I can find it, which should be pretty sweet. And hopefully some more serious exploring over the weekend.

Ping pong and more sights

Update on ping pong:

We got to play today!! It was awesome. As soon as we got to class, my friend and I looked at each other and took our new paddles halfway out of our backpacks, and we were practically squirming the entire first half of the lesson. Then during break we got up and started sprinting up the stairs to the ping pong table, but as we were going all the other male classmates saw us and said “PING PONG!!??” and started running up with us. So excited. It was really good to play—that’s a great sport and it felt like a huge release. Except that after about 10 minutes, I went too hard for a slam and accidentally hit my friend’s ball out the window! Five stories up. Oops.. Felt like an idiot and apologized profusely and gave him one of my ping pong balls (the flimsy game one, though, not the more durable practice one), but still sort of a bad start. But then we laughed a lot and let some of our classmates play. The Japanese guy isn’t very good but is really funny and enjoys it a lot, and one of the Laotians is amazing. I’m starting to like these people a bunch.

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Changing topics, a couple other interesting sights, which I didn’t get pictures of because I would have felt awkward (Eric Loui, where are you?):

--Kids defecating in the street! I think I was warned about this, but I hadn’t seen it until today, when I saw it twice. Find a nice hole in the pavement, drop pants, and let loose. One of them was going into a tree planter, which I thought was a good call on the part of the mama

--Walked by a beggar yesterday as he was talking money out of his dish and cramming it into a bag under his blanket, leaving just enough in the bowl to give the impression that people are in fact giving things, so you passers-by should too. While I definitely recognize the psychology behind this, and I’ve seen it done by musicians mostly, it seems a little dishonest from a beggar who’s not performing or anything. Isn’t the idea that he’s totally destitute and doesn’t have any other options, so he’s begging to fill up his bowl so that he can buy food, and once he has enough he can go eat and be happy? This way it seems more like begging is his job and he’s got savings stacked away, just like anyone else. Idk. I guess I don’t really want to be too harsh on him.

(Sidenote: people in Philly, if you ever get the chance go to Reading Terminal Market on a Saturday afternoon. At least all of last year, there was this kid there who was about fourteen and would play amazing piano for several hours. I went there to work one day and stayed for maybe two hours, during which he pocketed at least $150. After every song he would empty his bowl and start again. Totally deserved though).

--Still on beggars, there are a lot of them here, and some of them are extremely deformed. Really sad—you have to wonder how they got like that, and I hope it wasn’t one of those horror stories where somebody did that to make them look more pitiable. They all have their own turf, too, where they go everyday and sit and beg for long, long periods.

Life in Kunming

I haven’t written any posts for a while. Sorry. Some of that is that with classes I haven’t been doing as much noteworthy things, and also I’m still sort of working out life here, which has taken some time and work.

Classes continue to be interesting. I’m starting to get to know some of my classmates, most of whom I like quite a bit. I made friends with a Korean guy today, and we’re going to play ping pong during break tomorrow. Yay! That’s something that was really high on my list for China—play tons of ping pong—but so far I haven’t really done any. But today I bought a paddle (that was something in itself: I knew ping pang was a big deal here—this is the character: 乒乓。 Get it?—but the minute I asked my host dad and one of his students where I could buy a paddle, they both jumped up off the couch with excitement and spent maybe ten minutes walking me through how awesome the sport was (I assume) and giving me detailed instructions on every part of the paddle purchase. It was awesome, and really helpful), and tomorrow we’re going to play. And maybe I’ll do the same with some Chinese people at some point.. Plus I’m sort of counting it as a legitimate travel interaction, as opposed to coping out and hanging out with other foreigners, because even though this guy isn’t Chinese he doesn’t speak English much. I’m learning some, though not as much as I would like—hopefully I’ll do better next week, when I’m taking private lessons—and having a pretty good time. Except for Ting Li, listening class, which is really really boring—it consists of us listening to a tape recording of people saying “a”, “o”, “e”, “i”, “u”, “ü”, “ba”, “bo”…… for two hours straight (well, there’s a ten-minute break in the middle, thank goodness). The other classes are all big on interaction between students, or between students and teachers—a pretty good call, I think—but this one has zero. AND the teacher doesn’t even tell us what the words we’re hearing mean, even though about half of them are new. AND despite what I just said, she speaks English more than any of our other teachers. I don’t want to take too much out on her, because she is nice and she does have a more difficult set of material to make interesting, so it’s hard to tell if she’s actually worse than everybody else, but it strikes me that if you ever want a job where you get to feel impressive and accomplished without having done much, you should be a listening teacher for your native language. You just have to read a bunch of really simple words (“moth-er”, “fath-er”, “sis-ter”, “broth-er”) in a teacher accent, then watch and critique as your students screw up this most simple, babyish thing. Anyway.


I haven’t gotten to do that much exploring this week because with two hours of class in the mornings and afternoons and meals at 12.30 and 6 there haven’t been many big chunks of time in which to walk around. I did go back to Green Lake Park yesterday to take pictures, and got some okay ones, which I’ll post in just a sec. Also on that trip I got to witness rush hour here, which was crazy. I figured this is a pretty small city, but it also has fairly small streets, and they were blocked up for a long ways:



I had to wait about five minutes for a break long enough to cross a one-lane road exiting the park. And the rush hour is on foot and bicycle as well as car, so being on the sidewalk doesn’t get you out of it:

The Rise of English

The other big observation about classes so far is that it’s funny because though a lot of the students are from various parts of Asia (this university is a target school for teaching Chinese to SE Asia, since we’re so close), the teachers all speak Chinese and English. So when the class doesn’t get something, they say it in English and all the Americans and Europeans nod, while the rest of the class isn’t much better off. This fits with the fact that as a country, China is totally into English, to the exclusion of every other language on the planet as far as I can tell. ALL the kids take English in high school; ALL the infrastructure is labeled in English as well as Chinese (except for some road signs, which gave me trouble on my first walk); there’s an entire China Central TV Channel devoted solely to English, the only non-Chinese programming I’ve seen yet, despite the fact that this province alone has 50 different minority groups, most here for centuries, who presumably have at least a few languages among them; and most books and newspapers have titles in English as well as Chinese (I can’t decide if I like this or not: on the one hand it’s nice to have some idea of what’s going on, but on the other I keep getting my hopes up at the sight of some letters I recognize, hoping I’ll be able to learn something, only to find nothing but hanzi for the next 200 pages). This is probably the right call—English is the world’s language, period—and they’re definitely making themselves more right by insuring that another billion-plus people speak it as their second language (I’ve read that the number of people studying English in China is greater than the number of native speakers of it in the world. That might be exaggerated, but not by much, and it gets the scale of this across pretty well), but I’m not totally sure how I feel about it. One it means that traveling in China as an English speaker is categorically different from and much, much easier than doing so speaking some other language (Social justice types: Discuss! Is this fair/just/avoidable?), and two it seems a kind of depressing premonition of the end of linguistic diversity. After watching The Linguists and Wade Davis’s TED talk (this is worth watching if only for the last two minutes, when he tells the story about the shit knife), that’s something that I’d like to avoid, but I really don’t see much of a way out of it. The difference between knowing English and Croatian, or Spanish and Mam, or Chinese and Naxi is so huge that there’s virtually no reason anyone would choose to study that latter three, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not beautiful ways of communicating and valuable lenses through which to view the world.

First day of Classes

So today (actually yesterday now, but I had trouble getting online to post it) was the first day of classes on all sides of the globe. It went pretty well here: I felt pretty good about my language skills and got some big helpers on pronunciation. I think that in the near future I’m going to try and switch to private lessons in order to cram more into what’s seeming like an increasingly limited time here—is it really possible to get a decent grasp of a language from nothing in 2-3 months? I’ll keep you posted. But they were talking about how by the end of the semester (in January; I’m not staying for the whole thing) we might be all the way to reading sentences, and I guess I’m hoping for a little more than that. But we’ll see.

My class was about 50-50 Westerners and Asians, which is apparently high—most of the classes are dominated by people from Southeast Asia and Korea, with a few Japanese and Westerners sprinkled in. It was kind of interesting, too: for the most part, the Westerners had less trouble with pronunciation than did the Asians. The Laotians in my class especially had a lot of trouble making some of the sounds, though by the end they were doing well. Came as a little surprise (though it probably shouldn’t) considering that we’re only a couple hundred miles from the Laotian border, while Europe and Meiguo are considerably further away. And a big illustration of the fact that despite the beliefs of much of the United States, Asia is in fact a hugely diverse continent and it’s peoples are no more similar to one another than are Inuit, European Americans, Mexicans, and Jamaicans. Or pick any four nationalities, and really I’m feeling sort of uncomfortable about grouping people like that, because all those societies are totally diverse in themselves… so the point is that just because they look the same to you doesn’t mean they’re at all alike in any way, even in appearance, your eyes aren’t trained very well.

The other thing was that while talking to some of the students, I met not one but two people who have been in China off and on for about six years, and are still just starting to learn the language. I’m impressed that you could do this, given how many people speak pretty good English and how enormous the demand for English teaching is, but it’s kind of crazy that it seems to be so common. We’ll see if I avoid it; I hope so… In general I don’t really like traveling to places where I don’t speak at least a little of the language, because it feels like I’m missing most of the point. I’m still not sure if I’m going to be able to get that here or not, but I really hope that I can. Just from living here for the past week I’m impressed that this is a huge, diverse, vibrant, lively society, and once you have the key of the language all that is unlocked, and it’s enough to fill 3-4 lifetimes at least. I’m working on finding that key.