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.
1 comment:
Robert! It sounds like you are having such a good time. I wish sooo much I could have come to Kunming this week... gah there just isn't enough time to do everything, but at least we are both enjoying ourselves. To answer your question, no, I do not like hiking now ^_^ I think the only reason it was tolerable this week was because I was in the best shape of the group besides the tour guide (who later told me he does the tour twice a week...ewww!! 8x/month he said! eww!) so I felt very li hai, plus the hikes were fairly easy hahaha. That said I do grudgingly give that hiking allows one to see beautiful places that one would not see otherwise. this doesnt mean i'm about to join The Outsiders when we get back to swat or ever, but at least I don't see it as an utterly pointless activity haha!
sidenote: totally jealous you got to go to the stone forest.
other sidenote: so, to clarify, are you taking the semester off from swat and just paying chinese college tuition? that actually sounds like such a good plan that I sorta wish I had done...darn.
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