BJ Day 2

I have now been in Beijing for over 24 hours, and I still have yet to see a building that was built more than probably five years ago.  Actually, most of the places I've been are about 3 months old: today I went to the airport to pick up my family (hoooray!!!!), and then we toured around the Olympic venues some.  

Here are the highlights:

Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital Intl Airport.  This is probably the single most impressive infrastructure building I've ever been to.  You take an Airport Express subway train that goes right up to the front of it, then branches up and down for departures and arrivals.  Then you walk into this GIGANTIC hall, all open air and really beautiful and absolutely huge, where, in my case, you get a sandwich and read a guidebook while you wait for your family to arrive.

Walking up the axis of the city towards the Olympic green.  Note how HUGE this thing is, and also the large number of people.  Also check out what the kid is doing: besides flying a kite, he's riding on one of these two-wheeled skateboards that are really common here.  You get on it and balance some, and then move your feet back and forward to keep from falling and to propel yourself.  They look like a lot of fun, though I would guess it's a little tricky at first.

The Bird's Nest!  We didn't know that it had lights on the same theme.  Cool.

More Bird's Nest.  This gives a little bit of a sense for how ENORMOUS this thing is.  That seems to be the idea of the city. 

The Water Cube, a little bit before it lit up. Very cool stuff.

That's everything for the moment.  Tomorrow my Dad's going to a meeting, while the rest of us go off exploring somewhere.  Hopefully we'll decide where exactly in the next hour or so.  I'll try to keep you updated.

北京

I'm back. Sorry about the extremely long pause there; I was finishing off things in Kunming and didn't have that much time/inclination last week.  But now I have just arrived in Beijing, so I will possibly be back in form.  Hopefully I'll have some reflections on Kunming to post at some point pretty soon, but for now I want to talk about first impressions of this city.

1) It's BIG.  There are a lot of people living here, but more than that the place is massive.  I'd heard people say things along the lines of Beijing is built on a superhuman, rather than human, scale, and I'm definitely impressed that that is the case.  All the roads I've been on are 4-5 lanes each direction, and the blocks are gigantic.  I went walking for about forty minutes earlier, in a straight line, and literally crossed one street. 

2) It's pleasant.  I know that the pollution here is legendary, but I didn't see it today.  There was a huge brown pall that we had to descend through (I think it made the plane more turbulent than normal), but on the ground the sky was blue and absolutely gorgeous, just a little brown smudge on the horizon.  And it was cool! I forgot how much I love fall, but the air was that perfect crispness and it made me very, very happy.

3) It's inhabited by pirates!!! No joke.  I'd heard about the Beijing accent--it's actually what we studied, since my textbooks were printed here--but I still wasn't prepared to hear it spoken, especially by people who were being serious. Essentially, they add R's to the end of many, many words.  Literally multiple times a sentence. It's pretty awesome.  So you get people saying things like "Ni zairrrr narrrrrrrr??" or "Wo zhu zairrr zharrrrrrrr"  I approve :-).

The other nice thing about this place for me at the moment is that it's back in civilization. Kunming was a big city, but this is definitely more equipped with cushy pleasures.  Illustration:

--I just took a shower after dark using hot water that was not warmed by the sun.

--Then I pooped, sitting down, and flushed the toilet by pressing a button (not pouring a bucket of water in) and all of it disappeared.  What a sight.

--My clothes are currently in a dryer (granted, I'm paying $5 for the experience).

--I'm using high-speed wifi and have not had my connection suddenly disappear for over an hour.

:-D.  This stuff isn't really worth rejoicing over for very long, but it is kind of nice... 

Also I finally learned how to use my Chinese typing software correctly.  Yay! 所以现在我能写更多汉字！ I typed that so quickly, too!!!

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. 

Shilin

Yesterday morning I woke up bright and early at 5.45 for the earliest and longest day trip from Kunming yet: Shilin, the Stone Forest, which is a collection of upended rocks about 80 miles from here. Excellent day.

The reason for the early departure is that the friend I was going with wanted to take the train, of which there are two a morning. But this was worthwhile, since I figured taking a train is an important China Experience. It turns out it was, too. To me, the train felt much more Communist than most of the rest of the country I’ve been seeing. It’s big and mechanical for one thing, and the conductors wear semi-military uniforms:

Taking the train.

Inside things are Spartan, but practical: the interiors consist of rows of slightly padded benches and tables, and are filled with Chinese people headed home. Plus it’s democratic: the 120 km trip cost us each a total of 8 yuan, about $1.10. And while we’re at it, might as well mention that this one at least was remarkably slow and stopped frequently (though these were planned, and we arrived exactly on schedule, three hours after we began). So all in all it was different from planes, which have been straight out of the first world, and buses, which remind me more of my trips around Latin America. This one was second world, in the old sense of the word.

Once we got near Shilin, we began to see weird lumps of rock sticking out of the cornfields (actually not corn, but ‘fields’ sounds strange by itself to me by now :-). This place is sort of Fountain inverted: instead of limestone sinkholes dropping out of the earth every so often, there are limestone towers sticking up from it. As we approached the park itself, they got bigger and bigger. On arriving at the park itself, we found we had been beaten by approximately eighty buses of tourists, but that the place had been neatly paved and sanitized for our convenience. We paid our 100 kuai (ouch! And that was with student discounts!) to get in, and tried to find a way out of the shouting throngs.

Sorry this is blurry, but I wanted to show what we were dealing with. At least everybody stays on the paths...

However, eventually we made it out of the crowds by turning off the main street. In that sense Chinese and American tourists are remarkably similar: they all want to be in exactly one place, and if you can put just one corner between you and them, you’re golden. We started to explore entirely on our own (still on paved trails! Though admittedly these ones involved some pretty impressive contortions.

Into the Woods.

The best way I can think of to describe the rocks is to imagine a cross between Bryce and Peek-a-Boo Canyons, only done in white instead of red. And two-dimensional: unlike Bryce, which forms the edge of a plateau, and Peek-a-Boo, which is basically a stream, this place spreads out in all directions, covering a huge area. It was just tower after gigantic tower, with tiny cracks between them that we climbed through. Here go some of our adventures:

Rocks rocks everywhere!

Looking up.... yes, that's the trail we're walking on.

Ooohhh...


This was NOT allowed, but he did look pretty awesome.

Pretty sweet, no? I liked it a lot. Unfortunately, we only had one day and couldn’t explore the whole thing. After extracting ourselves (a significant challenge!) and holding our breaths and noses through the front, crowded part, we made our way to a nearby town called Lunan, where there’s a market on Saturdays. That was great fun to explore—I bought a collection of the sweetest cookies I think I’ve ever had, plus a new type of fruit and some pomegranates—and afterward we got lunch at a noodle place. Hen hao chi: I got a bowl of cold, thick rice noodles, which a bunch of types of spices and sauces and veggies. It cost forty cents.

Then it was time to head back to Kunming. We approached a person on the street and asked where the bus station was. But instead of giving us directions and heading on her way, she said she would take us there herself. Then she called out to a friend who was about to bike away, and told us to get on the backs of their bikes. I got on the friend’s bike, and watched as the other two sped away. But I was a little heavier than my new guide, and after wobbling for a couple meters, she said it wasn’t going to work. So we tried me in front, which worked a little better (except that she almost collapsed under my backpack; I should work on lightening it a bit), but didn’t last us all the way. So eventually we had to walk; meanwhile the other two were nowhere to be found and she didn’t know where the bus station was. By the time we’d asked people and figured it out and actually gotten there, she was not amused with her friend.

We took the bus back to Kunming, and this was another highlight, because we had a really good conversation about everything from airlines to social economic class in Korea and the US to interracial relationships and multiracial children, which I was able to talk about for a while, possibly longer than she intended..

Eventually we made it back home, through rush hour, and to school almost exactly twelve hours after we left. Not bad at all.

The rest of Shangri-La!

These are terribly, terribly overdue--I got back from our trip exactly two weeks ago--so I'm sorry about that. But in the effort to actually get them up I think I'm going to cut back on narrative. Basically we went bike riding in a neighboring valley that was full of active Tibetan villages and was super beautiful and awesome, and then the next day we went to the monastery, which was awesome but discovered. Not bad at all.

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Here goes:

This is the valley we explored. You get an idea of lots of scattered houses, and big spaces in between.

A typical resident. Amazing, beautiful, possibly sad.

The northern end of the valley floods during summer to create Napa Lake, a huge shallow bird sanctuary.

Pretty cool, huh? We couldn't stay off of that causeway after seeing it from this angle..

Day two, we went to the monastery. Here we're looking back toward town. Gives a sense of the city. I liked this place.


This is the monastery. It's something like the second or third biggest one, with about 700 monks there now (including some cute kid monks!). Unfortunately for us it draws a crowd worthy of its awesomeness, at least during National Day.

These are the kinds of houses that surround the monastery. Except for the occasional satellite dish, you really don't see much sign that they've changed in the last couple centuries.. Though I suppose that could be said about a lot of houses at home, too.


We decided to climb the hill overlooking the monastery, mostly because it was there and we didn't have any better ideas, but it turned out to be a good call.This is looking back towards the lake we had visited the day before. Pretty impressive from this angle..


This is what we found at the top. You might not be able to see, but there were two Snow Mountains on the horizon, absolutely amazing glinting in the sun. Gave us a glimpse into yet another world.

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..

This is cool

Air Traffic Worldwide 24HR from kouko a on Vimeo.