Paralympics Begin!

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!!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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.