Not China-related: Obama for Obama!

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. 

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..

Big Macs and late night wanderings

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!

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…..

An afternoon

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......

Some pictures from the weekend.

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

Dian Chi, seen from Xi Shan

The restaurant where we ate

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.

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.

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.

The Rise of English

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

Some thoughts so far

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!

In Kunming

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!"