Zhongguo pengyou!

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

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

Cool.

An Afternoon Walk

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

Life today

Other things from today:

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

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

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

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

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

I think that's all I've got.

Waiguo Ren

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

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

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

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

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

Random thoughts..

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

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

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

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

Escaping Kunming! Not...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Continued Exploration (sorry, this one is super delayed)

Hi again--

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


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More exploring.

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

The entrance to Golden Temple Park

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

Lots of pathways..

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

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


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


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

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