Day to day life

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..