Robert's Writings

Flight Maps!

2010-02-25T18:54:00.000-08:00

One of my main projects this spring involves conducting an analysis of airport traffic to see whether it makes a difference to have a rail connection to the airport. It's really fun and I'm enjoying the chance to construct and analyze my own personal dataset.

A byproduct of this is that the data I'm using to find out which airports are the busiest (the BTS Origin and Destination Survey) comes in origin-destination pairs, which I'm compiling to get the total number of airport users. But first, it offers me the chance to make my first maps with data!!!! I thought these were pretty cool, and they give me a chance to demonstrate my newfound prowress with Python graphics. First, an image of US flights in 2008:

This shows the top 500 or so actual trips made by planes. The width of the lines is proportional to the number of passengers traveling between two given airports. You can see the importance of hubs like Atlanta, Denver, and Dallas-Fort Worth, which are all really busy even though the cities they serve aren't that large. I thought it was neat to see all the airlines in one place, as opposed to the in-flight magazines which only show hubs for one or two airlines. When flying on Northwest, you would get the impression that MSP, Detroit, and Memphis were the largest airports in the country, and while that obviously wasn't the case, it was sort of hard to compare with airports serving other airlines. Still, it's pretty much what you might expect if you travel a fair amount.

The other map I made was a little harder to predict:

This one shows origin and destination pairs--where people are actually traveling to and from, not counting transfers. It only has the top 350 or so pairs, and I made a few changes to better illustrate some trends, mostly consolidating airports in cities with more than one, like New York and Chicago. You can see how different it is from the segments in the other map: it turns out that the main trend in US air travel is people going from the East Coast to Florida and the Southwest. It turns out that some of the busiest airports, like Atlanta, Dallas, and even Chicago to an extent, get most of their travel from people flying through them on their way to somewhere else. And whereas the flights give a fairly consistent net over most of the country (except Montana), the destinations are much more focused on the major centers of population and tourism.

Anyway, hopefully this info is interesting to other people. I know I had been curious about where people actually travel, and whether Atlanta really is that huge a destination. Now we know it's not, it's just the gateway to Florida (and most other places).

Whining about wine

2009-05-13T19:08:00.001-07:00

When you get a chance, check out the "Environment" section of this month's National Geographic. It's about the carbon footprint of shipping wine from major production regions to various major US cities, and you can see it here. It's worth looking at for a few reasons:

1). The main point, which it makes dramatically, is transporting goods by truck, which is the most common way by far to move things in the US, is incredibly inefficient. Moving a bottle of wine from Napa to New York by truck releases 4.4 pounds of CO2 versus just 0.9 to ship a bottle from Sydney to NYC. It's roughly equivalent in terms of carbon to drink a bottle of wine trucked to NYC from upstate New York as it is to drink one shipped from Bordeaux.

2). Also interesting is the backlash on some wine blogs, particularly those devoted to producing upscale wines in idyllic parts of California. I googled the article to try to link to the graphic (they don't have it online! n00bs...), and turned up a bunch of these blogs ranting about it, plus some very probing comments on the site of the guy who made it. One of them even has a new graph that adds in the carbon emitted by sending a package of National Geographic magazines across the country :-).

It looks like they have some points--he wasn't entirely fair to California, assuming for example that all Australian wine started in Sydney instead of the countryside, and possibly assuming that wine shipped to the ports closest to its destination instead of checking where it actually goes. I see their concern that now in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of slightly-informed National Geographic readers Californian wine is Bad For the Environment, while in real life it's less clear. So I'm going to reconsider my initial impulse to chide them about pouncing on environmentalism the minute it touches fancy small-batch wine from California. Mostly, though, we should stop flipping out about eating (or drinking, apparently) local for energy reasons, at least until we know what "local" and "far away" mean. This was brilliantly expressed last year in Time.

I liked the original graphic mostly because of how it made the point that the distance food travels doesn't matter nearly as much as the way it travels. If we really wanted to help the environment through infrastructure spending, and make ourselves much better set up for future prosperity, we would be seriously thinking about improving our freight rail connections. It's sort of crazy that we've let trucking overtake rail transport in this country, through a combination of auto/asphalt industry special interests and government policies that required railroads to run money-losing passenger trains (this makes me a little nervous about $40 billion high-speed passenger rail projects in California). They had trains in the 40's that could ship food cross-country with less energy than we use today. Families used to ship their refrigerators to their vacation homes for the summer, just because it was so cheap! I really like the idea of taking a fast train from Minneapolis to Chicago, but I have to wonder if that option makes anywhere near the economic and environmental sense that investing the money in freight railroads would.

Specter and Swine Flu

2009-04-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Good reading:

On what to expect from the flu: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/opinion/28barry.html

And about the impact Specter's switch might have:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/specters-switch-more-insult-than-injury.html
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/why-specter-did-it----and-had-to-do-it.php

Drugs

2009-04-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

Our topic in Latin American Politics this week. A bunch of recent developments, basically pointing to increased tolerance and possibly decriminalization of marijuana in the US, but continuing the main thrust of the War on Drugs in Latin America:

Marijuana now essentially legal in CA.
You can even go to school to grow it.
But our policy in Mexico is still more of the same, even under Obama..
Finally, a really detailed description of the whole process as of last summer.

Best line of the whole thing is from the third article: '“By supporting the Calderon administration in their fight with the cartels, we’re keeping it from becoming a fight on U.S. soil,” [Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard] explains. It’s not hard to see why someone like [Mexican journalist Lydia] Cacho would find that rationale unappealing."

China topic, with normal cringe-inducing US behavior

2009-04-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

I hope we don't embarrass ourselves again....
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904u/shanghai-expo-2010

Doga

2009-04-08T23:49:00.001-07:00

I'll refrain from comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/fashion/09fitness.html?em

Change in style: link-dumping

2009-03-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

So I am well ensconced into normal school life now, learning about Latin America, the US, and Probability. Part of normal life means not enough time to condense my thoughts into the beautiful prose that you were reading over the course of last semester. Instead, I think I'm going to start using this as a more traditional blog, eg a way for me to disseminate the cool/interesting/important things that I read without having to interrupt all my friends' email lives.

Highlights from my google reader today:

1. This seems sort of disturbing. Did you know that Wyoming and Nevada are huge tax shelters, and even more secretive than Bermuda or Switzerland? Last week's Economist

2. Visualizations! This person's coming to Swat next week :-D

Mourning Show

2008-12-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

Originally when I made this blog I was planning to keep it going after I left China, figuring that there were a lot of other interesting places to go and interesting things to see, that are probably way further off the radar and way easier to get to than China. I haven't been doing that, but I'm still sort of hoping to.

With that said, today was the last day of the Morning Show, on MPR . I'm not really sure I can get across the full significance of this event for Minnesota commuters, musicians, acoustic music fans, and public radio listeners to anyone who hasn't lived here, but it's prettty significant.

The Morning Show has been around since 1969--it was founded by Garrison Keillor, before he started doing his Prairie Home stuff--and has had its current hosts since 1983. It's pretty simple: eclectic but warm and funny folk music, punctuated by satirical ads for things like the Sherpa SUV from Intimida ("It's a Mighty Big Car") or Genway genetically engineered supermarkets, and interviews with personalities ranging from pirates to high schoolers to life coaches, all voiced by the same incredible voice, Tom Keith. As far as I can tell, essentially every member of the enormous and brilliant Twin Cities music scene--Peter Ostroushko, Greg Brown, Ann Reed, Pat Donohue, Peter Mayer, and sooo many more--was featured on the show at a fairly important time in his or her career.

Anyway, I'm really sad about this, since listening to it while I take my sister to school is one of the things I look forward to when coming home. So I thought I'd at least make a tribute. You can listen here to the opening hour of the final show, which was recorded live starting at 6am today to a packed house that had begun gathering three hours earlier and featured reprises of all the major characters as well as appearances by many of the artists who have appeared on it over the ages. The first few minutes give an idea of the range these people have, or you can skip to minute 39 to hear my favorite ad, from Intimida. Or listen to the music! And Dale Connelly, the man behind most of the content, will start doing an online radio service tomorrow on radioheartland.org. I can't recommend it enough.

BJ Day 2

2008-11-02T04:49:00.001-08:00

I have now been in Beijing for over 24 hours, and I still have yet to see a building that was built more than probably five years ago. Actually, most of the places I've been are about 3 months old: today I went to the airport to pick up my family (hoooray!!!!), and then we toured around the Olympic venues some.

Here are the highlights:

Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital Intl Airport. This is probably the single most impressive infrastructure building I've ever been to. You take an Airport Express subway train that goes right up to the front of it, then branches up and down for departures and arrivals. Then you walk into this GIGANTIC hall, all open air and really beautiful and absolutely huge, where, in my case, you get a sandwich and read a guidebook while you wait for your family to arrive.

Walking up the axis of the city towards the Olympic green. Note how HUGE this thing is, and also the large number of people. Also check out what the kid is doing: besides flying a kite, he's riding on one of these two-wheeled skateboards that are really common here. You get on it and balance some, and then move your feet back and forward to keep from falling and to propel yourself. They look like a lot of fun, though I would guess it's a little tricky at first.

The Bird's Nest! We didn't know that it had lights on the same theme. Cool.

More Bird's Nest. This gives a little bit of a sense for how ENORMOUS this thing is. That seems to be the idea of the city.

The Water Cube, a little bit before it lit up. Very cool stuff.

That's everything for the moment. Tomorrow my Dad's going to a meeting, while the rest of us go off exploring somewhere. Hopefully we'll decide where exactly in the next hour or so. I'll try to keep you updated.

北京

2008-11-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

I'm back. Sorry about the extremely long pause there; I was finishing off things in Kunming and didn't have that much time/inclination last week. But now I have just arrived in Beijing, so I will possibly be back in form. Hopefully I'll have some reflections on Kunming to post at some point pretty soon, but for now I want to talk about first impressions of this city.

1) It's BIG. There are a lot of people living here, but more than that the place is massive. I'd heard people say things along the lines of Beijing is built on a superhuman, rather than human, scale, and I'm definitely impressed that that is the case. All the roads I've been on are 4-5 lanes each direction, and the blocks are gigantic. I went walking for about forty minutes earlier, in a straight line, and literally crossed one street.

2) It's pleasant. I know that the pollution here is legendary, but I didn't see it today. There was a huge brown pall that we had to descend through (I think it made the plane more turbulent than normal), but on the ground the sky was blue and absolutely gorgeous, just a little brown smudge on the horizon. And it was cool! I forgot how much I love fall, but the air was that perfect crispness and it made me very, very happy.

3) It's inhabited by pirates!!! No joke. I'd heard about the Beijing accent--it's actually what we studied, since my textbooks were printed here--but I still wasn't prepared to hear it spoken, especially by people who were being serious. Essentially, they add R's to the end of many, many words. Literally multiple times a sentence. It's pretty awesome. So you get people saying things like "Ni zairrrr narrrrrrrr??" or "Wo zhu zairrr zharrrrrrrr" I approve :-).

The other nice thing about this place for me at the moment is that it's back in civilization. Kunming was a big city, but this is definitely more equipped with cushy pleasures. Illustration:

--I just took a shower after dark using hot water that was not warmed by the sun.

--Then I pooped, sitting down, and flushed the toilet by pressing a button (not pouring a bucket of water in) and all of it disappeared. What a sight.

--My clothes are currently in a dryer (granted, I'm paying $5 for the experience).

--I'm using high-speed wifi and have not had my connection suddenly disappear for over an hour.

:-D. This stuff isn't really worth rejoicing over for very long, but it is kind of nice...

Also I finally learned how to use my Chinese typing software correctly. Yay! 所以现在我能写更多汉字！ I typed that so quickly, too!!!

Not China-related: Obama for Obama!

2008-10-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

Yimei just shared an amazing photojournalism site with me. I thought this one was pretty cool: Obama for Obama!! For the record, this is NOT how you should decide in an election where you can actually vote.

Otherwise, this has been a good week, though with little that is particularly striking. Been going to class and having great times and nice conversations, and progressing some on everything but writing (I'm not going to be able to write in Chinese for a few more years, if ever). Then hanging out with friends! This has gotten much more common over the last few weeks, which I am very thankful for, though I wish I could have done it sooner. But I'm seeing a pretty nice section of Kunming life, or at least Kunming expat life. From my host family and their buds, to Chinese students at my institute (mostly studying languages and language-teaching, with plans to study abroad in Thailand or Oklahoma) to lots of people from SE Asia here on scholarship, many of whom speak incredible Chinese (Thais especially for some reason, plus they speak good English, and sometime Korean, or French, or.. ), to my old classmates, who I now talk to in a mix of pidgin English and two-month-level Chinese.

Then there are other Americans and Europeans, like the people at frisbee (though this is changing: we now have a bunch of Chinese players who started watching and got intrigued! One day Kunming will be the leader of an All-China Ultimate League :-), and finally I've spent some time with the established Kunming Laowai, people who came here and have set up businesses and created lives. I ran into the people who are sort of employing me the other day, and had a drink with them and the owner of a couple restaurants in town. That was really interesting--he has an incredible Indian place along with a pub/library, plus he does runs into Laos to 'import' Beer Lao, which is widely known among expats for being waaay better than anything local (I liked it ok, but my beer palate is not particularly experienced). It was sort of interesting to see how people adjust to this place long-term, and I'm curious to know how they end up here--was it some sort of plan, or were they just hanging around for a while and finally decided the hostel was getting old? I definitely am impressed at the sort of hodge-podge of work that most people undertake: my employers, for example, run the GoKunming website as well as two or three others (China City Listings! Check it out!). Then they work for Fodor's Guidebooks, keeping the chapters on SW China up to date. And they do some consulting work for right now the China Economic Quarterly. Plus they've been in several movies, frequently getting their brains blasted all over the TV. Basically if something comes up that looks sort of cool, they jump on it, even if it's different from anything they've ever done. I kind of like that style. It works is that the pool of capable people who are native speakers of English and also can get by in Chinese is pretty tiny here, especially people who are here long term and have free time. But the random stuff it's possible to find doesn't pay on the order of first-world jobs, so you have to take whatever you can get.

Beyond that, I'm reading a lot and relaxing some. Not a bad time at all.

Shilin

2008-10-19T05:03:00.001-07:00

Yesterday morning I woke up bright and early at 5.45 for the earliest and longest day trip from Kunming yet: Shilin, the Stone Forest, which is a collection of upended rocks about 80 miles from here. Excellent day.

The reason for the early departure is that the friend I was going with wanted to take the train, of which there are two a morning. But this was worthwhile, since I figured taking a train is an important China Experience. It turns out it was, too. To me, the train felt much more Communist than most of the rest of the country I’ve been seeing. It’s big and mechanical for one thing, and the conductors wear semi-military uniforms:

Taking the train.

Inside things are Spartan, but practical: the interiors consist of rows of slightly padded benches and tables, and are filled with Chinese people headed home. Plus it’s democratic: the 120 km trip cost us each a total of 8 yuan, about $1.10. And while we’re at it, might as well mention that this one at least was remarkably slow and stopped frequently (though these were planned, and we arrived exactly on schedule, three hours after we began). So all in all it was different from planes, which have been straight out of the first world, and buses, which remind me more of my trips around Latin America. This one was second world, in the old sense of the word.

Once we got near Shilin, we began to see weird lumps of rock sticking out of the cornfields (actually not corn, but ‘fields’ sounds strange by itself to me by now :-). This place is sort of Fountain inverted: instead of limestone sinkholes dropping out of the earth every so often, there are limestone towers sticking up from it. As we approached the park itself, they got bigger and bigger. On arriving at the park itself, we found we had been beaten by approximately eighty buses of tourists, but that the place had been neatly paved and sanitized for our convenience. We paid our 100 kuai (ouch! And that was with student discounts!) to get in, and tried to find a way out of the shouting throngs.

Sorry this is blurry, but I wanted to show what we were dealing with. At least everybody stays on the paths...

However, eventually we made it out of the crowds by turning off the main street. In that sense Chinese and American tourists are remarkably similar: they all want to be in exactly one place, and if you can put just one corner between you and them, you’re golden. We started to explore entirely on our own (still on paved trails! Though admittedly these ones involved some pretty impressive contortions.

Into the Woods.

The best way I can think of to describe the rocks is to imagine a cross between Bryce and Peek-a-Boo Canyons, only done in white instead of red. And two-dimensional: unlike Bryce, which forms the edge of a plateau, and Peek-a-Boo, which is basically a stream, this place spreads out in all directions, covering a huge area. It was just tower after gigantic tower, with tiny cracks between them that we climbed through. Here go some of our adventures:

Rocks rocks everywhere!

Looking up.... yes, that's the trail we're walking on.

Ooohhh...

This was NOT allowed, but he did look pretty awesome.

Pretty sweet, no? I liked it a lot. Unfortunately, we only had one day and couldn’t explore the whole thing. After extracting ourselves (a significant challenge!) and holding our breaths and noses through the front, crowded part, we made our way to a nearby town called Lunan, where there’s a market on Saturdays. That was great fun to explore—I bought a collection of the sweetest cookies I think I’ve ever had, plus a new type of fruit and some pomegranates—and afterward we got lunch at a noodle place. Hen hao chi: I got a bowl of cold, thick rice noodles, which a bunch of types of spices and sauces and veggies. It cost forty cents.

Then it was time to head back to Kunming. We approached a person on the street and asked where the bus station was. But instead of giving us directions and heading on her way, she said she would take us there herself. Then she called out to a friend who was about to bike away, and told us to get on the backs of their bikes. I got on the friend’s bike, and watched as the other two sped away. But I was a little heavier than my new guide, and after wobbling for a couple meters, she said it wasn’t going to work. So we tried me in front, which worked a little better (except that she almost collapsed under my backpack; I should work on lightening it a bit), but didn’t last us all the way. So eventually we had to walk; meanwhile the other two were nowhere to be found and she didn’t know where the bus station was. By the time we’d asked people and figured it out and actually gotten there, she was not amused with her friend.

We took the bus back to Kunming, and this was another highlight, because we had a really good conversation about everything from airlines to social economic class in Korea and the US to interracial relationships and multiracial children, which I was able to talk about for a while, possibly longer than she intended..

Eventually we made it back home, through rush hour, and to school almost exactly twelve hours after we left. Not bad at all.

The rest of Shangri-La!

2008-10-18T20:30:00.000-07:00

These are terribly, terribly overdue--I got back from our trip exactly two weeks ago--so I'm sorry about that. But in the effort to actually get them up I think I'm going to cut back on narrative. Basically we went bike riding in a neighboring valley that was full of active Tibetan villages and was super beautiful and awesome, and then the next day we went to the monastery, which was awesome but discovered. Not bad at all.

----------------------

Here goes:

This is the valley we explored. You get an idea of lots of scattered houses, and big spaces in between.

A typical resident. Amazing, beautiful, possibly sad.

The northern end of the valley floods during summer to create Napa Lake, a huge shallow bird sanctuary.

Pretty cool, huh? We couldn't stay off of that causeway after seeing it from this angle..

Day two, we went to the monastery. Here we're looking back toward town. Gives a sense of the city. I liked this place.

This is the monastery. It's something like the second or third biggest one, with about 700 monks there now (including some cute kid monks!). Unfortunately for us it draws a crowd worthy of its awesomeness, at least during National Day.

These are the kinds of houses that surround the monastery. Except for the occasional satellite dish, you really don't see much sign that they've changed in the last couple centuries.. Though I suppose that could be said about a lot of houses at home, too.

We decided to climb the hill overlooking the monastery, mostly because it was there and we didn't have any better ideas, but it turned out to be a good call.This is looking back towards the lake we had visited the day before. Pretty impressive from this angle..

This is what we found at the top. You might not be able to see, but there were two Snow Mountains on the horizon, absolutely amazing glinting in the sun. Gave us a glimpse into yet another world.

Day to day life

2008-10-16T03:06:00.000-07:00

Let’s see.. Cool thigns that have happened recently:

--Yesterday night I went to a party! Two of my better friends—a Japanese guy and his Zambian roommate—had a giant “Riben Cai” (Japanese food) party. They invited more than 20 people over to their apartment, and cooked a huge pot of rice and soup. It was great food, but the really excellent part was the mix of people. For the most part they were foreign students, but hailing from all over. I was the only American, and then there were one or two English and Canadians, and then 1-2 people each from Costa Rica, Korea, Estonia, Thailand, Vietnam, Austria, Estonia, and Japan, plus several Chinese. And everybody was speaking a mix of English and Chinese, adjusted so that beginners could understand. It was really cool, and probably the most widespread crowd I’ve hung around with in a while.

--This is the time of year for grad students to plan out and approve their final papers. My host Dad is a management professor, and I just came home to find him interviewing two students.. it was sort of neat to see him in his teacher roll: I think of him as this funny and fun older guy, very friendly, very low key and easily pleased (hooray! You got a word right!). But here he was going over their ideas pretty thoroughly and asking them lots of questions and to explain things etc.

Similarly, both of my Chinese teachers are grad students, so yesterday and today they had their meetings with advisors to decide if they are on the right track. But the cool part for me was asking them about their topics. One of them is doing her report on really specific local languages in one county a little north of Dali. In that one place, a subset of Dali prefecture, which is a subset of Yunnan province, there are about six established minority cultures. So diverse. So she’s looking at their languages and how they are different in that one tiny spot. My other teacher is a literature major, so she’s looking at the writings of ____, who is basically the the second Daoist. But she’s not as into his ideas as his style, which is very distinctive and really beautiful. So she’s doing basically an analysis of why he chose to write like that and how it influenced future literature. It was really cool to hear about these, because they reminded me so much of assignments we might get at Swat. My Chinese teachers are intellectual academics too!

--On Tuesday I went over to the other university for a change of location, since it’s a lot bigger and quite a bit prettier on the whole. But it was cool because I met a random Bangladeshi guy and talked to him a bit. Apparently there’s 4-5 Bangladeshis in Kunming, all of whom are going to be here for 4 years, studying first Chinese and then other subjects. I was pretty impressed, and it was neat to talk to him about China, Bangladesh, and the US. He said that trade between the former two is growing like crazy, and I think that Bangladesh is starting to have factories—perhaps the next China? But as yet there are no road connections, even though it’s not that far overland. Burma and NW India in the way, though. I’m curious if that will ever materialize. Right now they’re just finishing a superhighway into Laos, which will make it possible to drive from Kunming to Bangkok in about a day and a half. Somehow that’s incredible for me to contemplate. I was also impressed at the effect of British influence on South Asia..

This is cool

2008-10-13T10:26:00.001-07:00

Air Traffic Worldwide 24HR from kouko a on Vimeo.

Big Macs and late night wanderings

2008-10-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

So this evening I met up with a guy who shared a room with us in Shangri-La. He's on his 4th month out of six, and has been for quite the ride: started in Western Europe, made his way over to Russia and then across the Trans-Siberian Railway to Ulaanbaator, from there through China, and now tomorrow onto Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia before flying home from Singapore in December. So that's cool, and it was fun to talk to him again, but it also furnished some new Kunming experiences:

1). We ate at McDonalds!! I normally don't really go for the "I've been out of the country for sooo long; I need a Big Mac now!" type thing, but his mind was made up--supposedly no McD's in Vietnam--and I have to admit that it tasted pretty good. I'm not actually sure if I've ever had a Big Mac at home, but burger, fries, and coke were all welcome here. And eating all of this sitting on the second floor of an absolutely franchised McDonalds, looking out over the downtown walking district with all of its neon signs and talking with this friend from New York was pretty surreal; I felt like I was in some random modern American city. Globalization.....

2). I have to mention this because I'm an economics student: Big Mac Index!!! And I can confirm that in real life, I paid 22 kuai for a Super Sized (well, not really by US standards, thank goodness) Big Mac Meal. By nominal exchange rates, that's just under $3. I'm having trouble finding American prices online now (probably because they vary from state to state), but next time you visit the Golden Arches you can see for yourself if the Yuan is as undervalued as everybody likes to claim (if it's undervalued relative to the dollar, the Big Mac will be cheaper--in dollars--here than at home. In a perfectly 'flat' world, the Big Macs would cost the same everywhere, since they're more or less identical no matter which country they're produced and consumed in. If currencies are all valued 'correctly,' a given amount of money in one currency should always buy the same amount of stuff as its equivalent in another currency, since they're worth the same amount. But in real life things don't always work like that.. ).

3). After an interlude of ping pong and movie, I ended up walking home pretty late at night (why I'm still up writing this even though I have class in 7 hrs). That was a sort of good experience: I was kind of nervous, but even at midnight there was lots of activity on the streets (more than any American city during the day, hah), and tons of policeman on almost every corner.

4). However, when I got to my university, I found the gate closed and locked!! Aaaahh!! Luckily, that was only the main one; they have an interesting system of locking some gates, keeping attendants at others, and leaving still others wide open. Whatever works, I guess. After some scared wanderings, I called my host dad and he came to get me (felt bad about this, esp since he tipped a guard on the way back). So everything worked out ok, but I think the lesson is to check the curfew before you leave in the future.

Weekend, Part 1!

2008-10-13T01:37:00.001-07:00

The weekend! It ended up being pretty awesome, though through no real fault of my own.

Starting with Saturday, I woke up around 10 with no real plans, a little nervous about being bored all day. But then I got a call from my English teacher friend, who said that some young friends of hers were interested in going to the movies with me! I assumed that she meant the teenager who went to the park with us last time, but I got to the entrance of the university with my bike and found two people waving back at me who I recognized not at all.

But we had a great time! They were both highschoolers, and led me downtown while talking about school, Kunming, my plans, etc. Then we went to the Brothers Jiang for lunch, which is a chain of guoqiao mixian restaurants. Yum yum. After that, a run to the grocery store for beer (China = no drinking age), and then to the movie theater, where we saw Painted Skin. It’s a movie based on an old legend about this demon who stays in a house disguised as a beautiful woman in the hope of coming between a general and his wife. She causes tons of trouble and lots of deaths, but in the end even though he loves her he is faithful to his real wife, and in the end she give up and turns into a cat and brings all the main characters back to life. It was advertised as a horror movie, and when I saw the posters I was not excited at all (most of it was taken up by this woman who was entirely white and crying blood out of her eyes), but it turned out to be more about action and jokes than terror. Good deal.

So that was one really fun positive experience out of the blue. Another one, slightly less unforeseen, came a couple hours later. I got a call from my Macalester friend, asking if I wanted to get dinner so I could give him back his movie and waterbottle. We ended up going to a Muslim place (there are lots of Hui, Chinese Muslims, here), where we got a dish called Hui Mian, “Muslim Noodle.” That what it is, and the singular is correct. It’s basically a tomato soup with some veggies and beef and other things at a good level of spiciness, and one long, long homemade noodle (my guess would be it was 5 feet by half an inch). It was cool: we could see them making the noodles at the table in front of us, and they were probably the best I’ve ever had (that’s not saying a ton coming from me, but they (it, I suppose) were excellent).

We got talking to a guy who was sharing our table (friends with really really good Chinese skills!) and ended up hanging out with him afterward. He took us to an arcade! This was my first experience with Chinese arcades, and I’d say it was pretty positive. Mostly, it was a lot like American arcades, with lots of videogame machines spread around a room. Even a lot of the same ones: they had House of the Dead, which I think was pretty much required for an arcade license (if such things exist) at one point. Then a lot of the late 80’s/early 90’s 2D fighting and shooter ones. The one major difference that I noticed, though, was that EVERYTHING WAS FREE. I’m still not sure how that worked, but we went in looking for where to get tokens etc, and our friend told us that they don’t cost money, and in fact none of them did. A pretty nice deal.

After that, we went back to the movies and saw the beginning of Wanted, which a lot of friends at Caltech loved this summer. I didn’t know much about it, except that it was about a Fraternity of Assassins (they saw it while I was watching WALL-E). I was impressed, though we had to leave early bc someone wasn’t feeling well.

Thoughts on Chinese movie theaters, since I didn’t say that above: mostly, lots of variation, if the two I saw were any sample. The first one, downtown, was pretty much what I expected from the US, the only difference being that it had six floors and that we had assigned seats. But the second one was a little different. The room was tiny, with seats maybe for 20 people. The seats were basically just cushy chairs covered in red fabric, arranged in rows. One thing I thought was pretty clever: in addition to normal, one-person seats, they also had two person love seats, perfect for snuggling up close to someone. And they thoughtfully put those in the back rows, with singles up closer to the screen ;-).

That was Saturday. I’m going to pause now and read some (big excitement of the past week was finding all these used book stores) plus maybe study a bit. I’ll fill in about Sunday, hopefully with pictures, in the somewhat near future I hope, and I also still owe you the second half of Shangri-La…..

Shangri-La

2008-10-09T07:21:00.001-07:00

Yes, it’s real. Now. This was definitely the climax of our trip, to the point that prior to leaving we were both viewing Dali and Lijiang almost as things to be endured in order to get here. Definitely wasn’t fair in retrospect, but I think our excitement was pretty much justified.

This started on the bus ride up from Lijiang. The road was definitely one of the more spectacular I’ve ever driven (or rather, been driven on, thank goodness). Basically, significant portions of it involved climbing up the sides of what must have been almost as deep a gorge as the one we had visited the day before. This twisty road snaking up amazingly deep and steep and spectacular valleys, with our bus feeling slightly to large for the job.

A view out the bus window. Whoa.

To add to the thrill we saw not one but four accidents on the 150km journey, including one car that had flipped completely. Scary.

Once we got to the city, we dropped our stuff at our hotel, thankfully booked long in advance—the entire city was full, to the point that they had set up a checkpoint on the road and were turning back anyone without a reservation. Then we started our explore.

The view from our hotel window. I liked our spot a lot.

Two defining features of Shangri-La: 1) it is at 3200 meters, more than 10,000 feet above sea level, which means that it gets chilly quick but also that the air has that special, high-altitude feeling to it that I love. Though it doesn't translate into gigantic snowcapped peaks directly overlooking the city, as you might assume from the name it has adopted. 2) Even though it’s still a couple hundred kilometers from the border, it’s more or less a Tibetan city. This means all the signs have a third language (and a third alphabet :-) on them.

I thought that only tiny towns in the interior west did this!! I was pretty excited at the Tibetan version :-).

Tibetan also means that yak—literally, “plateau beef”—meat, milk, and butter is easily had everywhere. This was how we started our exploration: headed to a recommended restaurant and ordered a big pitcher of butter tea. Those of you who’ve had this delicacy before may know what’s coming. Basically, we saw the much larger pitcher available for only five kuai extra and figured we’d try it—we’re pretty thirsty, right? I know I can drink a fair amount of tea. Little did we know how serious the ‘butter’ part of it is. The tea is great, sort of sour at first but then quite creamy. Quite, quite creamy. After two cups each, we were both stuffed, to the extent that we had to force down the excellent dishes we’d ordered and couldn’t even contemplate another sip. Uff.

After that adventure, we actually walked around some. Both of us liked the town a lot: it somehow felt (perhaps inaccurately, but I don’t think so) much more like a real place than either Dali or Lijiang. Our hotel was two blocks from the central square of old town, but still the road more or less disappeared about 20 ft further on and turned into a grassy track that climbed a hill up to a pagoda.

Looking down on the city from the hill right above our lodging.

On the other side were lots more old houses in a sort of village, with cows and pigs wandering around and people doing farm work in Tibetan clothing (big pink headdresses). Futher up the hill is a another pagoda with a commanding view of the town, and beyond that is a real live monastery/temple, complete with prayer flags:

Yeah, this is how they work in real life. I’d like to see you do that in your dorm room.

The first day we just walked around old town buying souvenirs (our standard first day on this trip; it’s convenient but I still don’t know how I feel about buying the stuff before you’ve seen the place). But at one point we were walking through the square and I heard someone shout “Robert!” Turns out it was a couple of friends from Frisbee, who had amazingly also decided to go to NW Yunnan for the fall break. So we spent most of the evening with them, in large part because among their ranks was one person with not one month but two full years of Chinese under his belt, who thus could order confidently from restaurants, ask people not just for directions but recommendations on what to do, and a whole host of other incredibly useful things that we probably would have benefited from on our journey. He’s also a cool story because he goes to Macalester and had the same thought process as me: “Wait, we have to pay full tuition to study abroad? How about I pay the $1000 Chinese tuition instead, and go to Kunming because it has better weather and less pollution?”

Anyway, in their company we went to a plateau beef restaurant and had an amazing meal consisting of yak prepared in a variety of ways with a variety of vegetables. It was a good time, not just because of the food and company but also because the restaurant was a far cry from the ones we’d been frequenting. It was a little hole in the wall that didn’t have menus; you just pointed at the specific vegetables you wanted and said which ones you wanted yak with. And then they cook it all up for you, and it ends up costing 22 kuai a person for a gigantic meal with eight or so plates, and butter tea. Awesome.

Following that, we decided to get a movie. We had a pretty involved search for a DVD store that was still open, but these are the kinds of things you can do with a decent command of the language! I got there a little after the first people, and this is what I found in their hands:

Yes, Harry Potter VS. Lord of the Rings. Tell me that’s not worth coming to China for.

Everybody was pretty pumped, but the problem was that they weren’t going less that 15 kuai. That was a little more than we were willing to pay, but the concerted efforts of six people weren’t enough to drop them below ten. We tried every trick in the book, even invoking our status as students to get it down to seven (I later used this to great effect on a ‘yak’ leather belt, even bringing out my Yunnan Normal University ID to get the last 10 kuai off), but they weren’t budging. So eventually we counted out 9.50 in exact change, gave it to them, and headed for the door. They laughed and let us go, but not before trying one last time to bring it up to 9.80. Definitely a good bargaining experience. The movie itself didn’t live up to its case unfortunately, and turned out to be just a compilation of a bunch of the films, no real combat involved. Still, the concept alone was worth it.

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I think I'm going to leave off there for now, because this is already getting long and it's already getting late. More on what we actually did coming up in the hopefully near future.

An afternoon

2008-10-08T03:35:00.001-07:00

So today had some good experiences:

1) I voted!! Or at least have the ballot and am ready to vote and mail it off tomorrow. Yay!!! I went with Minnesota, which means that I get to vote for Obama and Franken and Tim Walz (tipping my hand here; oops :-/), so I'm pretty excited. I'm slightly pessimistic about whether my vote will make it because: a) There's a decent chance it won't make it to Minnesota by the 4th, given that I'm still waiting on a package here that was sent more than three weeks ago; b) even if it does, you're supposed to put the same passport/drivers license/SSN that you gave them in the application, and I don't remember which one I used; and c) I printed out the ballot on 8x11 normal letter paper, but it's supposed to be bigger and it's an optical ballot. Also I don't have a black marker to use with it. So we'll see, but this is still exciting.

2) I got a new thumbdrive. Not particularly great, but what was cool about this one is:

--It's 4G, so 8 times as big as my old one.

--It will mostly likely work, even without being propped up into the USB slot. And it has a cap!

--I bought it from some random stand that appeared this morning beside (on?) the railroad tracks by my school.

--I paid 70 kuai for it, about $10. I'm glad I didn't end up going for the 8G $80 one at Best Buy last summer.

3) I got to hang out with some of my former classmates, which was great fun and consisted of a nice mix of English, Chinese, and Vietnamese (which was cheating since only two people could understand it, but...). At one point this involved this Japanese guy lighting a cigarette, putting on his paper boy hat, and scampering up a nearby tree to impersonate a monkey. Great fun :-). AND I met a new Chinese friend who is cool and just started university here. Also, we were hanging out later with one of her friends and I ended up looking through their English text, and one section was on "Writing Emails." It was awesome: covered the use of all caps and emoticons to emphasize points, and lots of parenthetical statements. And then for the exercises they had to take letters and change them to sound more like emails. Very nice, and actually I think a pretty useful lesson (see this blog post).

4) Said Chinese pengyou took me to a used bookstore because she wanted to buy English books to read. I was pretty pessimistic: looking at the racks, it was alll Chinese and mostly textbooks, except for one copy of Bass Guitar for Dummies. But the owner started digging and pulled up 8-10 English books, mostly from the 70's (a biography of Getty, a discussion of the future from a Cornell prof written in 1970, the third Space Odyssey book..). But then he whipped out from nowhere Longitude, which I liked a lot and recommend highly, and Complications, the one book I started and wanted to read this summer, but couldn't for a string of reasons. I sort of jumped and exclaimed when I saw it, which they laughed at, and then bought it for $2. Nice.

So yeah, a good afternoon, even though the frisbee people switched locations and didn't tell me so I ended up missing that. We'll see how the rest of the week develops......

On toilets..

2008-10-07T08:44:00.000-07:00

Kate just put up a post venting about squat toilets (she's pretty much on target by the way; I still can't balance properly in a squat that leaves an opening without using at least one hand for balance, and I've been told that people of European descent are literally not flexible enough to hold that position for any length of time. I'm not the person to test that out on (Nastia Liukin, maybe?), but it's definitely true in my experience), and seeing it gave me the opening I've been looking for to discuss a different feature of bathrooms that I discovered on our trip: the no poop toilet.

This was not something I had anticipated. Basically the state of plumbing in many restaurants here is such that the pipes can’t handle anything more solid than urine, so they have screens over the drain and signs warning you off. The first time I saw one of these—it was along the lines of “Please No Defecating in Toilet”—I was a little puzzled (“Are you shitting me?” hahahah). But later ones made it more clear: “No Shitting;” “Our plumbing is old and will not last if subjected to stool;” “Please do not poop in the toilet”. Wait, what? Don't poop in the toilet?? Where are you supposed to poop then?? Even Salvador’s, the nerve center of Western life in Kunming, doesn’t take any crap from its customers--you have to pay 50 yuan if you accidentally poop in their toilet.

I guess what you should take from this is that you shouldn't necessarily go for restaurants in China if you need a quick dump, but rather stomach the half kuai and go for a public trench-type establishment. Also that I'm more amused by this kind of thing than I should be.

Ok, I've done two posts a day for two days straight. You people are going to get spoiled.

Lijiang

2008-10-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

Stop two for us was Lijiang, a little further north and quite a bit higher than Dali. It was an interesting place that has a lot of history, but unfortunately is known for it. We were sort of taken aback on arrival: here was this absolutely beautiful, very well-preserved, quite extensive old city, filled with tiny winding streets lined with canals of glacial runoff, and every single building is a shop selling jewelry, old Mao memorabilia, ‘antiques’, made-to-order wood carvings, and other souvenirs ranging from the slightly tacky to the ridiculous. My favorites were the dreamcatchers. Yes, American Indian dreamcatchers like the ones you buy on the great plains, complete with bald eagles at the center. Feeding all of this were enormous amounts of people, jamming all the streets and making a constant racket. Almost all Chinese tourists, too, which surprised me a bit, though later someone suggested that perhaps most Western backpackers had been warned off, at least during National Day (which, to be fair, probably exacerbated all this considerably). The net effect was sort of an Eastern Venice: a remarkable place—it’s a world heritage site, after all—but one that’s been completely given over to tourism and no longer has anything else.

This doesn't quite capture the density, but gives you and idea of what we were dealing with.

Still, it wasn’t that bad, and we managed to see some pretty cool stuff while we were there. The first day we wandered around the town, getting quite lost in some of its streets. We ended up climbing a hill from which you could overlook the old town. Pretty good view:

Look at the size of that old town! And the pretty mountains in the distance..

Then we wandered around some more and ended up on top of another hill, since the only way to avoid the crowds seemed to be to outclimb them. This one had a temple on top, plus a pretty great view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain:

Yulong Xueshan. It’s pretty impressive, and definitely dominates the skyline of Lijiang. And, at 5500 meters, 18,000+ feet, it’s the largest mountain I had ever seen by a fair margin. Wow.

That night we retreated to our guest house, where they were having a barbecue. This consisted of a huge number of skewers containing everything from eggplant and tofu to beef and squid. For 38元 we got to cook and eat as many of them as we could stomach. At this point in our trip we were experts on the barbecue skewer, having supplemented around 70% of our meals with them, but we had never done our own. So we proceeded to learn, and as of one week later managed to succeed in avoiding undercooked badness. It was great fun, though I was definitely nervous about the potential for raw pork. Plus we stuffed ourselves in a big way.

By day two in Lijiang, we decided we had done the city itself. So instead of hanging around some more, we went to Tiger Leaping Gorge, about 2hrs away. The gorge is a pretty amazing place: basically, the Yangtze River cuts between Yulong Xueshan and another, almost-as-tall mountain, creating a gash that at its most extreme points is thirty meters wide and thirty-nine hundred deep. That’s somewhere between twelve thousand and thirteen thousand feet. Whoa.

The approach to the gorge. Here you can get a little sense of how hugely far up into the sky these mountains go.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to do the real trek, which involves hiking the whole 20km length about 3000 feet up on one side over the course of two days. Instead we walked what is supposedly the narrowest, deepest section for about 2.5km. But the problem with that kind of height is that it’s hard to appreciate fully from the bottom, where you can see up a thousand or two but not even close to the full height. Even so, we were impressed:

Looking down the gorge.

When we had finished with the gorge, we got back to the lot to find that our ride had disappeared and apparently broken down. After a bit of frustrated conversation with our hotel (who had arranged our transport) we ended up asking a nearby minibus if we could hitch a ride back with them. That worked out well: the were a friendly family from Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai, and they were staying in a village outside of Lijiang that we’d wanted to check out on account of it’s supposedly being a little less touristy. So we took our ride with them and ended up in Shuhe, which did turn out to be quite a bit less crowded and just as interesting, if much smaller. We ate a very pleasant linner in a café literally over a canal:

After that, we decided to walk back to town, mostly because we didn’t have much better to do and thought it might give us some nice views. It didn’t really—most of the trip back was spent in what can only be described as brand-new, prefab suburbs—but it did give us the chance to see some of the new (read: real) town, which was nice. And we had a great conversation about the past and potential futures of Chinese foreign policy on the way back. This is why I like traveling with Swatties.

On our return, we dumped our stuff at the hotel and assured them that we had in fact survived, then set out to explore Lijiang by night. This was especially exciting because it was National Day proper, October 1st, and people were out celebrating everywhere. It was pretty exciting, and the crowds contributed for once. We saw tons of people wearing light up devil horns, and people floating little candle boats down the canals (and other people, a few hundred yards downstream, fishing them out with nets), and eventually, as we made our way back up the hill to our favorite coffee shop, the whole city lit up in celebration. It was a pleasant night, and a good way to end our time in Lijiang.

Just so you know what we're talking about...

2008-10-06T06:55:00.001-07:00

I came across this picture on strangemaps.wordpress.com, and I think it gives you a sense for how huge this country is in terms of population. My province alone, which is pretty tiny and out of the way, has about the same amount of people in it as Colombia.

Dali!

2008-10-06T03:01:00.000-07:00

So the first stop on our trip was Dali, a town in western Yunnan about 350 km from here. We took the bus over, enjoying the benefit of the giant, sparkling expressway liking Dali with Kunming (it reminded me exactly of an interstate, except three lanes in each direction for much of the time, and through huge amounts of mountains. And much smoother). The city itself has two parts: the modern town, with maybe 200,000 people, and about 15 km away the old walled city, where the tourists go. We proceeded post haste.

The old town of Dali is a pretty big destination, (especially for French people evidently; interesting) but with good reason. It’s a big square that was walled at one point though isn’t entirely now, located about halfway between Erhai Lake and the Cangshan Mountains. It’s a pretty nice setting, and combined with very pleasant weather and old history—Dali was the capital of the Bai state for a long time, and is still home to a large number of Bai people—makes for a good visit.

Dali Gu Cheng (this is out of chronology). The main part is the square in the center, and you can see the lake beyond it.

The first day, we didn’t do much besides walk around the town. It was kind of nice because a) it’s small enough that you don’t feel overwhelmed, b) even in the old city, there is a mix of tourist-oriented streets and local places. We were sort of surprised, but after you get off of Foreigner Street (its actual name) the place becomes much less visited. So we went to the local market and saw them moving chickens around:

Chicken-tossing!

Some other general Dali thoughts. One interesting feature of Dali is the omnipresence of marijuana. In fairness, this is a pretty stereotypical hippie haven: beautiful, laid-back, semi-tropical, in some exotic developing country, and even home to a huge batik industry. But still, we were impressed that during any walk down the street we would be approached by at least 4-5 people—almost always older women dressed up in traditional Bai clothes, sometimes with kids—and asked if we wanted to smoke ganja. In those words, every time. It was annoying, because we didn’t (or if we did, not from them off the street) but also kind of sad because evidently that’s what they have to do for a living.

The whole time we were in Dali, we spent our evenings at our hostel. It was interesting and kind of nice, though walled off—literally—from the Chinese world outside it. The owner was an Australian guy who had moved to Dali and seemed to spend most of his time chilling at the hostel and talking to his guests and friends, most of whom were other older British Commonwealth types with local romantic attachments. It was kind of neat to hear them talk about all these years of traveling around Asia and having adventures while they drank beer, smoked ganja and still destroyed us at pool. There were other people around too, and I learned how to play Chinese Chess from one! It’s pretty similar to Western Chess, except that instead of bishops and a queen you have elephants and cannons. I’ll let your imagination work from there.

Day 2:

Day two was started with a trip to the three pagodas, to some extent the logo of Dali located a little ways outside the city. They’re actually part of an enormous temple complex, but the rest of it was more or less destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and only rebuilt about five years ago, so has lost some of the atmosphere. Still, the pagodas themselves were pretty impressive:

The three pagodas.

After that we went for lunch with the family of a friend from Swat, who happen to live in Dali, and got a wonderful meal with most excellent conversation on everything from China and Yunnan to the recent Chinese milk problems to the Baha'i World Faith to events at Swarthmore. It was good.

We followed that with a bike trip outside the city. This is one of my new favorite pastimes: bike rides in rural China. The cities here are quite modern, and much closer to urban areas back home than you might expect, but as soon as you get into the countryside everything changes. Suddenly you’re surrounded by hundred of tiny farm fields, each only a hundred or so feet on a side and planted in a different type of grain, rice, or vegetable, and each of which is being cultivated by hand by someone using very little in the way of machinery. It’s absolutely beautiful, but also kind of shocking to see people living like this, especially after getting off the gigantic ultramodern highway and checking your email over broadband internet literally on the other side of the street.

Working the fields.

Looking back towards town.

Our bike route took us down an irrigation dike between several fields, which was spectacular, and eventually we reached the lake. It caught us totally by surprise: we came out of the fields into a village—totally different atmosphere than the modern city five miles away—and after wandering our way through a bunch of twisty streets and through what seemed to be people’s driveways and yards, we ran into all this water! We picked a direction, and pretty soon came across this strange pier sticking out into the lake with somebody drying out his harvest on it. We asked him if we could go out and he said fine, so there we were. Felt like we were very far out of where we would ever have imagined arriving, in a really cool way. The lake itself is big, but long and narrow—what I believe the Finger Lakes are supposed to be like, or else Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin. It was beautiful, and exceedingly pleasant to stand on the shore of. And while we were standing there, some guy came rowing by and asked if we wanted a ride. Kind of neat.

It's pretty spectacular.

Looking across the lake.

Day three was mountains. This was pretty sweet as well. Behind the city, the rise up about 2000 meters, covered in pine trees the whole way. Really, really pretty, and so huge. We took a cable car up (lame, I know, but it was pretty cool) and then hiked for about 10km in and out of two river valleys. Beautiful, and just what you picture of Chinese mtns, in a way: super steep, small rivers at the bottom, lots of crooked-ish pinetrees, and fog rolling in and out of the peaks. At least that’s how I pictured Chiense mountains. I don’t really know.

This is where we're headed.

Whee!! Up we gooooo!!!!

Pretty pretty...

Besides the main views down towards the lake and town, we also got great waterfalls, crystal clear pools, and probably the best geological signage I’ve ever seen:

This one's for you, Mommy.

All in all, it was a pretty good few days. Plus we got to see amazing collections of marble (the Chinese word for marble has “Dali” in it) and batik, another local specialty. And ate fried goat cheese on a stick, plus lots of other good things on sticks and in general. But we had to move on eventually, and next stop: Lijiang!

It's coming, it's coming....

2008-10-05T06:48:00.001-07:00

Hello again! I have just returned from 8 excellent days traveling in northwestern Yunnan with a friend from Swat. It was pretty sweet: huge mountains, precious villages, beautiful fields, enormous lakes, perilous gorges (12,000 feet deep!), great new friends (as well as bizarre small-world encounters), and delicious foods: fried goat cheese, yak meat, Tibetan butter tea (the thickest, most filling beverage possible), a host of vegetables and mushrooms that I'd never seen before, and much, much more.

My plan is to write up detailed entries of all this over the next couple days and post them here with pictures. Warning though: I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed with the overall quality of the photos. Considering the HUGE number of spectacular places we went/things we saw, there weren't as many great ones as I was, well, expecting when I started to download things. Fundamentally, it was cloudy and rainy for about 80% of the time, so there's going to be a fair amount of blurriness here. You can deal, I suppose.

So, first stop: Dali! I'm going to crash right now though, because it's been a low-sleep week.

Real Classes, Week Two

2008-09-25T07:07:00.001-07:00

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.

2008-09-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-22T04:03:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-21T06:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-19T06:41:00.000-07:00

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

Life today

2008-09-18T05:11:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-18T05:11:00.000-07:00

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..

2008-09-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-09-13T03:36:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-09-13T03:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-10T22:55:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-06T05:45:00.001-07:00

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!!!!

2008-09-06T02:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-05T00:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-04T05:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-02T06:55:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-01T23:10:00.000-07:00

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.

More Exploration

2008-08-31T05:40:00.001-07:00

So tomorrow I finally start language classes. That's pretty welcome, because not being able to talk to people is starting to get a little old (though I am getting better! Yesterday I told my host dad that I was going for a walk and would be back in time for dinner, and he didn't flinch!). I'm not sure how much free time I'm going to have once they get going, so I've been trying to get at least a cursory overview of the city before the start. To that end I've been going on bigger explorations these last two days.

Yesterday I went downtown. This was good--got to see the true heart of the city, which was impressive and busy. And it turns out I might have been wrong about the Bird and Flower Market: I had read online that it was torn down a couple of years ago, but it's still in the Lonely Planet under "shopping", and when I went there I fo

und no building but lots of stalls, some of which sold birds and flowers. Also up for sale were everything from food and watches to army uniforms to Yao Ming jerseys and Che t-shirts (that's a whole post in inself: what's the significance of not just selling Che t-shirts, but doing it in a nominally socialist country, most likely with shirts that came from sweatshops, and possibly have had some history in a legal gray area?) to binoculars (! Not something I ever expected to see from a roadside stall) and X-Box 360's. And yes, turtles in eight different sizes:

I also saw two different mosques. That's one thing I thought was cool about this place: it's pretty diverse, especially for China. Yunnan Province as a whole is almost 50% ethnic minorities, and you see that to some extent in Kunming too. There's a lot of people wearing skullcaps, which I think signifies Muslims. Here's one of the mosques (this is the one that was torn down in 1997. LP describes the new version as 'a bad Las Vegas casino,' and I kind of see their point :-/):

You can read a little more about Muslims in Kunming here (I've been doing a little work online and have found quite a few other blogs about foreigners in Kunming, along with an online community center of sorts. This is good for me to know, and I'm looking forward to meeting some people, though I promise not to go too overboard. This trip is about China!). Next I went to the real center of town, which is a huge walk-only 'roundabout.' It was really nice, both because it was large and open and free of cars (they pass through tunnels below; two level roundabouts are a big thing here), but also bc it was crammed with people, as most things are here. Also very modern--you can see the one tribute to old architecture in this picture, totally overshadowed by glass high-rises on all sides:

Walked around a little more and saw some other cool stuff. Among the highlights were this bike parking lot:

Pretty serious, huh. And then this is one of my favorite signs here so far:

I consider myself pretty comfortable with the "Chinese characteristics" of socialism here, but "Park-n-Shop"??? The first thing that comes to mind is Buy-N-Large from WALL-E, the megastore that ruins earth by creating too much consumerism and pollution. Nice.

Today I went to Grand View Park, which is on the very tip of the big lake that stretches south of town. I've been getting teaser views of mountains in a lot of directions from town, so I wanted to see if I could finally get a good picture. The park was pretty neat: sort of a combination amusement park/pretty place to sit/set of pagodas/viewpoint. It was more of an establishment that I was expecting--you had to pay y10 to get in!--but well worth the trip and the money. Theme shot to give an idea:

This is one of the bigger buildings, but that's the overall picture: pretty buildings surrounded by trees with lots of canals and water all around. Eventually I made it out to the lakeshore and found it acceptable:

Pretty sweet. Those are the Xi Shan, "Western Hills." In real life, they look pretty huge and steep, which would be fun to explore. Apparently there's lots of random temples and things scattered around them. Supposedly you can bike there; that's definitely going to be something to look into.

Other highlights of the day were my first street food--I got a kabob in the park. It was awesome. They put the skewer on a grill and then brush it with lots of oil, which flames up some, and then when it's almost done they brush it again with chili peppers. The guy who was helping me flinched when he saw his partner do this on mine, but I told them I could handle it (actually I nodded and smiled) and did and it was great. So yummy. AND it was made even better because the people after me got some too and one of them took a bite and said "chih loh!" and then threw it away (note: my pinyin is definitely wrong because I've never seen most of these words written down. I'm not going to worry about it too much because they don't use it to write anyway. Until I learn to type. Hm). That made me happy 1) because I understood it (it means 'this tastes spicy!' or smtg to that effect), and 2) because I out-badassed a real Yunnanese. Or ate spicier food then them.

Anyway, that was today's adventure. Also saw lots of people playing cards and Chinese Chess (which I want to learn before I go home) and had a couple good 'foreigner' moments (the best of which involved a Chinese man leaning over and speaking loudly into my ear, to help me understand. Good to know we're not unique). Pretty satisfactory, and I'm getting a good feel for the city. And tomorrow, classes....

More thoughts on language

2008-08-30T05:14:00.000-07:00

Talked to Roz earlier about being somewhere without language. She brought up that this is a good experience to have even if it’s frustrating and lonely because it drives home sympathy for waiters, counter attendants, etc in the US who have really thick accents/otherwise don’t speak English very well. Very good point (note to all readers: DON’T EVER give people crap because they don’t speak good English. You have no idea the effort that they’re putting into it), but I think that the analogue to that is more along the lines of France last summer, where I had enough command of the language to make an attempt, but not enough to succeed without a lot of patience on the part of whoever I was talking to. What I’m getting out of this is a huge new respect for refugees, uneducated, and, yes, illegal immigrants, who mostly come to the US without any language skills whatsoever, only they don’t have a semester of language classes two days away (almost there almost there!), or a freshly filled bank account (thank you Caltech!) and flexible return ticket, ready to speed them home if things get unpleasant, or an established local family that’s completely fluent in everything who’s job it is to feed them and shelter them and get them out of trouble (see the post below about how these people are incredible and constantly saving my butt). Instead they have a lot of work and fear, and little recourse.

Say what you will about breaking the law, taking our jobs, Polluting the National Stock etc. (actually, please don’t say anything about the latter two), but you have to really admire their courage and drive.

Some thoughts so far

2008-08-29T17:55:00.000-07:00

So in the attempt to create more, smaller posts I decided to separate my narrative posts from my observation ones. They're still both pretty long, though. Here's some thoughts on life in general so far:

--Living somewhere without language. This has been less of an issue than you would imagine. I think the key thing is to have somebody who’s literate and fluent and is on your side. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand them either, just that they’re there to rescue you if you screw up and point you around if you need guidance. Otherwise, most day-to-day activities can be accomplished without words at all. In most cases—stores, banks, restaurants—both parties know the ritual well enough that you don’t need to explain anything. That’s sort of cool, actually. The one big problem with being mute is feeling isolated, which I’m not enjoying very much at all. But I think that kind of comes with the territory, and writing this blog helps with it. Why I’m eager for lessons to start.

--Along the lines of being lonely, I’ve had a lot of awkward encounters with other waiguo ren (‘outside country people’). There are quite a few who hang around the school building, and a fair number were at the temple today. I’m never quite sure how to act: on the one hand, I came to Kunming in part because I wanted to avoid the huge numbers of Westerners who go to places like Beijing and Shanghai (admittedly, I didn’t take this as far as I could have, since Kunming is still sort of a destination or at least a transfer point for lots of nearby destinations. That’s why I’m in this beautiful place instead of some polluted, stifling city in the interior), but on the other, some company would be nice right now! Though if the only thing we have in common is that we both stand out like sore thumbs, is that enough? For the moment I’ve sort of settled on a nod, somewhat more pronounced than what I give to Chinese people but not exactly a loving embrace. I still haven’t had a real exchange with any of them, which I think needs to end soon. But I suspect they’re having the same thoughts I am, because they’re not exactly jumping out at me either, and several of the ones I’ve seen speak pretty good Chinese (I assume, sigh).

--People here speak English. Not great English—they’d be discriminated against at home—but understandable, coherent English. I think almost every single person under about 30 is totally capable of carrying a conversation with me, with some effort but still. I was at the temple this afternoon, probably the single most non-Western place I’ve ever been, and a girl comes up and starts talking: “ Do you know why we have all the fish and turtles in the pond? It’s to symbolize long life.” NOT great for the self-esteem. And actually I’m realizing that I’m pretty lucky that my host parents don’t speak it; if I were staying with a college student I doubt I’d have learned anything up till now.

--As of this evening, I've been in China for exactly one week. That seems like the biggest understatement ever. It feels like I've been in Kunming alone for at least 2-3 weeks, with maybe 10 days more in Shanghai. Wish I could learn to adjust my perceptions like this at Swat!

Exploring Kunming

2008-08-29T02:34:00.000-07:00

So I’m learning that I might have been a little overcautious (me???) in arriving relatively early in the registration period: I definitely didn’t miss anything, and I’ve had lots of time to get established, but I’ve also had what will be 5 days with nothing really to do, and still little to no command of language. So there has been a lot of basically stalling. I’ve read a bunch of Mark Twain, quite a bit of Lonely Planet, done a surprising amount of internet surfing, learned to use Skype like a pro (can I just say that I’m totally blown away by it? My first call was from Shanghai, China to a cell phone at the time located in Pinedale, Wyoming, and it cost me two cents a minute. Absolutely unbelievable until today), played a little tennis, watched a lot of TV—kung fu movies are the normal favorite—and had many exciting and fun but draining conversations with my host family. Not bad, but I’m ready for school to start.

However, the other thing that I’ve started doing in my copious free time (is this the first time that’s been used non-sarcastically?) is exploring Kunming. Brief background: Kunming is a city of somewhere between 1 and 6 million; the capital and hub of Yunnan Province, in southwestern China. It’s at an altitude of around 6000 ft but is quite far south (I’d guess about even with Hawai’i, but I’m not sure), which means that has a really mild climate. According to Lonely Planet it wasn’t really a big city until around WWII, when it was a stronghold of Chinese Nationalist troops against the Japanese. This is where the Burma Road ended, if that rings any bells. Lately there’s been a huge wave of building (in China?!? sorry), coupled with the destruction of some old architectural treasures, most notably the old Mosque and the Bird and Flower Market. Sounds like a pretty big bummer actually.

But there’s still lots of cool stuff left! I’ve gone on a few walks around town, and seen good stuff. Yesterday I went to Green Lake Park, which consists of a big lake covered in lily pads (the green) with lots of islands and bridges connecting them. Really pretty, and full of tons of people. Kids running around, elders strolling, musicians practicing (I’m pretty sure it was practice), people of all ages chatting, playing games, and drinking tea. I liked it a lot:

I took a sort of wrong turn leaving the park, but it worked out ok because I stumbled into this really cool neighborhood of tiny narrow streets between old brick buildings. It felt completely removed from the huge modern city surrounding it, and much more foreign. There were people chilling in the streets, and lots of stalls selling different types of food: my favorite had about six kiddie pools of assorted sizes, filled with fish! I know that live fish are preferred here, but I assumed fish tanks. Probably silly, come to think of it. Other highlights were the chickens—on top of the cages holding the birds was a board with lots of feathers on it. Either a demonstration of the possible options, or maybe they pluck them while you wait? And then lots of really pretty assortments of vegetables and fruits. Plus, uber-cute children in the streets:

Today I went to Yuantong Temple, which is the biggest Buddhist temple in the city:

It’s on the order of a small cathedral in Europe, except that instead of one building there’s several surrounding a central pool and one in the middle of it. The pool itself is filled with hundreds of goldfish, turtles of all sizes, and giant frogs at least a foot long. Those last ones threw me a little—they look just like the turtles at first, and then suddenly you realize that’s not a shell, and those eyes are too big…

(Sorry, no frogs in this one)

I liked the temple a lot. It was really nice because it was so colorful! Unlike dour old churches, all the buildings here were bright colors: turquoise, blue, and red, with lots of gold around as well. And each of the buildings had a huge statue of Buddha inside. I was impressed too because it was definitely still a worship area—probably more faithful than tourists. There was one place where people would light sticks and candles, and then each door had a place to kneel in front of it. The other cool thing was how completely removed the place was from its surroundings: outside was a huge, bustling street, but inside it was all serenity, and it backs up against the zoo so there was a forest of sorts surrounding it. Very nice. One last item of note is that they were expanding it! There were people at work building what looks like will be a new gate in front of the main area, and they’re doing it by carving the structures out of wood, essentially by hand. Novel. And I like that they are doing a more or less traditionally, even in such a modernizing country.

More temple.

And so ends another super long post. I decided after last time that I was going to go for more, shorter posts, but that seems to have failed. Oh well. Yell at me in the comments :-P. One more picture, of the street right in front of my university:

In Kunming

2008-08-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

I'm here!!! After successfully navigating my way across the country yesterday (or rather letting myself be shepherded from friendly English speaker to friendly English speaker), I have arrived in Kunming. I can't believe I'm really here--I first stumbled across the wikipedia entry on Kunming probably almost 2 years ago, in sort of a daydream/future potential planning session. I remember it seemed like it would be a cool place because it's small-ish, near great sights, and far away from everything else. But never really considered it because it's way the heck out there, and why/how would an American student end up there? But now it's happened. Wow.

So far it's looking good: rainy and cool these last two days (still quite the novelty), which after boiling in Shanghai means it is living up to its reputation for great weather. Which it definitely has--I think during my entire planning process for the semester, literally every Chinese person I talked to, when I told them I was going to Kunming, would say, "Ooohh, it has great weather. I haven't ever been there, but it's supposed to be very pleasant. You will have a good time."

This morning I registered for classes. Probably the most exciting part was going down to the street to the bank and taking out 6200 yuan in cash to pay the registration fee (I had to use the special line for "elderly, handicapped, pregnant, and foreigners." Nice). That's about $1000, but it goes way further here: a bottle of water (the other thing I've bought so far) is 1 yuan (< 20 cents). So I had to cram 62 100 yuan bills into my wallet--it didn't really close--and walk back to the school to cough it up.

Besides that, mostly I've been hanging out and trying to get to know my host family. I'm staying with a professor at the University and his wife, and they're both amazing. We've been spending a fair amount of time playing "name things in Chinese and English," which is great fun and good for me, though I have some trouble remembering the things afterward. They're soooo excited and enthusiastic: she gave me a big hug the first time I answered a question right without having to puzzle through it for 2-3 minutes! So Great. Can't wait until I can actually talk to them, because I suspect they're going to be super interesting and fun.

Other thoughts:
--I keep getting hit over the head with how little Chinese I know. It's funny because I keep meeting people who I'm told don't speak English--my host father here is a good example--and they don't really, we couldn't have a conversation, but they still know way more English than I do Chinese--we'll be trying to talk, and I won't be understanding very much, and suddenly they'll pull out an English word for which I have no idea of the translation and I'll get it. Pwnd. I can't wait for classes to start.

--I've been watching a fair amount of TV here, because it lets me sit in the same room as them without distracting them from their work. Liangge thoughts:
--I don't know if this is true to some extent in the US, but here a significant number of TV stations are still replaying the Olympics for most of their schedules. You can literally turn on the TV at any time and see a selection of interviews with athletes, replays of the events in which China did well, and montages of important events/medal ceremonies. That's fun for me since I didn't get to see much of them while they were happening, and I think it gives a nice idea of how important the Olympics were for the people here.
--Watched some of the English-language CCTV9 this morning (not very much, I swear! And it was at my host family's insistence!). They were covering the war in Georgia, specifically the recognition of South Ossetian and Abhkazian independence by Russia. Sort of a different slant from what I've been getting via the Economist and BBC... mostly interviews with Ossetians and Abkhazians who were saying how happy they were to be free at last!! Here's the link to the equivalent bbc story, headline "West Condemns Russia over Georgia" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7583164.stm.

--BIG CITIES HERE. I don't think Shanghai's hugeness really came home to me until we went to the airport yesterday. The drive there was literally one high-rise apartment after another, in all directions we could see, for 40 minutes. That's what's really incredible--the fact that they still have skyscrapers 10 out from downtown. Wow. And then flying in to Kunming got to see some of it: apartment after apartment for a long long ways. Then during the drive from the airport to the university, my guide was talking about how Kunming is "A very very small city, not at all like Beijing, Shanghai." I guess true, but still seems way larger than almost any US city. "But we have good weather!"

Shanghai pt 2

2008-08-25T18:15:00.000-07:00

Greetings (again) from Shanghai. Over the last two days Yimei has done an amazing job of taking me all over the city. It's been great! (Possibly too) detailed overview:

On Sunday we started out by going to the Bund, a walk

way on the west side of the Huangpu river that is where all the big western banks used to be during round one of Shanghai's time as globalized center of Asia. Now it's more about walking down the river with the contrast of the imposing old buildings on the right and striking new buildings across the way on the left:

Impressive, no? It's actually even cooler because the river does this bend towards you right here, creating the effect that the Pudong is some sort of bubble that's reaching out towards you. It feels like you're looking across some magical divide to a different world that's tantalizingly close but just out of reach. Yeah.

After that we walked down Nanjing Road, a huge pedestrian shopping street that contained, among other things, a store dedicated entirely to the sale of scissors. This picture gives you an idea, though it doesn't do justice to the crowds. Note the Radisson hotel in the center right (with the UFO on top)--a not unsubstantial spurt of Minnesota Pride was definitely felt.

From there we went to the municipal museum, which had an amazing collection of all sorts of things relating to China and art and archeology and history. This country has a lot of all three. Among the highlights were the calligraphy (think of reading something written in Shakespeare's longhand), the exhibit on ethnic minorities (including an outfit made entirely from salmon skin), and the bronze work (my favorite piece in the whole museum [not actually true] was a "pillow" made out of bronze which featured five yaks, also made out of bronze, arranged decoratively around the place where you put your head. Each of these feature 2-inch-long horns also made out of bronze, on its head, making for what I'm sure was a very alert rest.

Next was a trip to the old town, basically what was the entire city before Westerners opened it up in the 1800's. It's about 4 square blocks. Very touristy, super crowded, but great for contrasting old/new shots :-):

Finally, we went over to the Pudong (the fantasy out-of-reach fairyland across the river) to go up the Jin Mao Tower (on the left in the above picture). We went up to the lobby of the hotel which occupies the top half or so of the building to see the view:

Not bad. After that we came home to eat an incredible meal and watch the Olympic closing ceremonies. Then bed, rest, and day two.

Day two was notable first because it rained. Given that I'm coming here straight from 10 weeks in LA, that was sort of a shock, ok? Plus it was a lot of rain--flooded streets, etc. When it finally toned down we went out to the former French Concession, once the, well, French Concession and now a trendy area. It reminded me of (wait for it...) Paris! Legitimately, though, because it had the same bigger sidewalks and huge leafy trees and low, older buildings made out of grey rocks with cute stores in them. Parts of it are also heavy on foreigners at the moment, to the extent that they don't even have Chinese writing in the windows.

Probably the best part of that was seeing the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party. It's an impressive, black-and-red building, very imposing. But it's funny because it's part of the same complex as all these western chain restaurants (the ones with no Chinese!). Which is about consistent with the ideology at this point, I guess..

We walked around a lot of really cool, cute, tiny streets with art stores on them, then eventually went for lunch at a wonderful dim sum place. Then explored some more and ended up on this tiny street chock-full of snack stalls. We got the Best Snack Ever, these dumplings with soup and pork inside that tasted amazing. I'm not doing them justice, but I don't have to because Helen does: http://hunckeydory.blogspot.com/2008/08/shanghai-shengjian.html.

That ended our tour, but we went to meet Yimei's parents for dinner at yet another amazing restaurant. This involved (drum roll...) riding the Shanghai Metro during rush hour. Whoa. I was not entirely ready for that. It took us two trains to get on, and then once we did we were crammed together more tightly than I have ever been ever. I think I counted about 28 people within a 3-ft radius of me, but you can actually figure this out better than I by figuring out how much space a person takes up (I'm guessing maybe 2 square feet), and dividing that into 9 pi. That's about 30, which would be 15 people, which means we were crammed tighter than is humanly possible!!! Check it out:

The picture isn't great, but my mobility was limited, ok?

So that was my Shanghai experience. Overall thoughts:

--The city is a giant jumble. The streets are fairly narrow on the whole, and they aren't on any sort of a grid at all. And they're totally bursting with people, bikes, and cars running in all directions. Then, all this is overlaid by skyscraper after skyscraper, which don't have any particular order to them, but it's a different no particular order than guides the streets. So you look up anywhere and you see 5-10 futuristic skyscrapers surrounding you in all directions.

--They're futuristic skyscrapers, way more modern-looking than most I see in the States. Glassy and classy :-).

--Amazing food, every single meal. If this is any indication, I'm psyched for the semester.

Hmm. I had some big profound unifying thoughts when I started writing those, but they seem to have left me. So that's my Shanghai experience! Right now I'm at Yimei's house, about to pack a little mroe, and in about 5 hours I'll get on my plane to Kunming. Exciting...

Starting up (for real, maybe)

2008-08-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

So it's a good thing that I didn't get too much going on the other website (robertswriting.wordpress.com), because I guess the real "you know when you're in China when..." is "...the Great Firewall blocks you for the first time." I like that one better, so if I somehow get access to it at some point I may resume over there, but for now this seems to work.

Woohoooo I'm in China!!!!! As of almost 12 hours ago, I have officially entered 中国。So far it's amazing. I'm staying with a friend from Swat who lives in Shanghai, which is an incredible city. Thoughts at this point:

--Getting off the plane in China was sort of surreal--"wait, that's all it took?" You just sit down for a while and suddenly you're on the complete other side of the world, np. It kind of reminded me of last summer when Katie and I got in the car at home and four days later pulled up at the edge of the Pacific. It's weird how mobile you can be once you start moving.

--Immigration/customs were way easier than the US... no lines or questions or anything. Sigh.. this is a police state and they're more chill about these things than we are...

--Shanghai 上海 (hah! it's so much fun using my Chinese typer :-) is pretty impressive. It's HUGE and full of high rises. Supposedly twice as many skyscrapers as New York at this point. I got into the new Pudong airport, which is gigantic, and then we drove basically this perfectly straight 8-lane highway back to the city. Then went to dinner at one of Yimei's favorite restaurants, which was in the "first food mall," 3 stories of nothing but restaurants, snack shops, and grocers. Cool idea, but what was amazing was how crowded and energetic it was. Absolutely full of people, all of whom were chatting and shouting and bursting with energy. VIBRANT. You (Yimei and I, at least) couldn't help grinning and laughing. Awesome.