More Kunming

Not much on Wednesday since the tour bus that was supposed to pick me up went to the wrong hotel. The only reason I was getting on a tour bus was because Dr. Yin arranged it for me to go to the Stone Forest, about an hour away. So I went back to sleep and let my stomach recover from yesterday's spicy food assault. Later I consulted my Lonely Planet and went out for a nice western breakfast of french toast and bacon. That night the female doctor wanted to take me to McDonald's because she felt bad about having me eat such spicy food.

 

Dr. Yin's 10 year old son, Yin Mo Ran, who goes by Mo ran and who says in English his name is Moran, is a funny kid. He spent a year at school in Richmond and his English is solid, just lacking vocabulary. I'm thinking about telling him he might want to use a new English name. Anyways he wanted to go to McDonald's so we went. Nothing special, I just wanted to note how I'm treated like a small child, because I was eating french fries, and the female doctor noticed I wasn't using ketchup and so she offered me the ketchup which was right next to the fries and showed me how to use it. Not to be critical but I have become incredibly critical, cynical, and sarcastic during my time here in China. I think its because thats what this country lacks, people who criticize things and who have sarcasm, or so it seems. Anyways.

 

Went to the Stone Forest the next day, rode there in a large van with my tour group. The lady next to me turns out to have lived in the same apartment compound as me in Beijing, she's a teacher at Tsing Hua, and she recognized UVA as a famous school in the US. My Chinese abilities really impress people here, I guess this is the first time I've spoken Chinese with Chinese people out of the context of studying in Beijing. So you start talking and you quickly are accepted. The Stone Forest was alright, the sign out front says it is regarded as one of the most impressive geographical wonders in the world, my Lonely Planet says that most people don't think too much of it on the scale of geographic formations. I think I only small a small bit of it since I was with a tour group, once again my Lonely Planet says if you go there you should first get away from the main tourist area. Oh well. You walk among these rock formations which were created by underground water movement and then slowly rose to the surface over time. They are cool. The park is a typically Chinese tourist spot, with more people inside selling things than visitors. We arrived back in Kunming and the bus went to a supermarket, then a flower market, and then some perfume or fragrance shop, I guess the purpose was for us to buy stuff. Probably how the tour company makes money by getting cuts for bringing business.

 

That night I went with Dr. Yin to a wedding party dinner. He knew a lot of people there, and I was introduced to all of them, and whenever you meet someone you take a drink with them. And I was poured a small wine glass of Mou Tai, which is the vile, incredibly strong (53%) Chinese liquor. I'm told its the best in China. Anyway I let that last the whole evening, don't plan on consuming it again. All these Chinese guys were getting fairly drunk and it was funny. They would come up to me and tell me welcome to Kunming etc, one guy told me he was glad to meet me and that I was his good friend about 20 times. You have to stop eating about every 30 seconds for someone offering cheers or a mini toast. I didn't get drunk though as I managed to consume a lot of food and we were there for a long time.

 

Today, Friday, I went to the Vietnamese consulate to get a VISA, but upon realizing that with the Chinese New Year/Vietnamese Tet, I won't get it back until the 7th and that would leave one week to go through Vietnam and get to Bangkok. And an Israeli couple that walked in to get a VISA who had just been in Vietnam and Thailand told me not to get it, that I should go to Thailand first and then back through Cambodia and Vietnam, and that down there in those cities traveling is infinitely easier to plan, since everybody is doing it.

 

I ate lunch at Dr. Yin's house with his family and some friends, that was good food. The two times I've eaten home cooked Chinese food have been very good. Its different than at a restaurant. This afternoon I had to choose between going to another temple somewhere or a zoo. Those were the options I was given, Dr. Yin's wife was to take me, and theres not much to do on your own around Kunming. Mo Ran (or Mike as he said he's also called) wanted to go to the zoo so we went there. There wasn't enough time to head out to a zoo outside of the city where the animals have a big field or something that they romp around in so we went to the city zoo where the animals live in empty cage/rooms that really don't have anything in them. Once again my critical side came out, I can't remember what American zoos are like, but I'd like to think they are better than this. The zoo outside of the cages was landscaped to look fairly wild, but inside was just cement. They had zebras and deer walking around on cement, one elephant had an outdoor pen but was chained to a post in the center leaving him only a 10 foot radius. The peacock part of the park was huge and the birds had it nice, freely roaming around amongst the people with some waterfalls and ponds. But we are in China so of course there was a mini amusement park inside the zoo with a small roller coaster and similar rides and various other ways to spend more money.

 

So here I am at an internet bar at midnight, they are dirt cheap, 25 cents per hour. The place is crowded, Chinese teenagers are geeks like me. People are smoking and its bad and I'm about to leave. Tomorrow is Chun Jie 春节 the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival. Its the holiday to end all holidays here. Moran/Mike showed me his stash of fireworks and I giddily await lighting them off tomorrow. There were firecrackers going off everywhere this evening, sounded like a mini battlefield. Tomorrow should be interesting.

 

In a few days we are going to head out into the "countryside" where Dr. Yin and his friends grew up. We will spend 3 days out there, do some fishing, and chill. I look forward to this. If I can find a cheap plane ticket to Bangkok I will try to fly there next Thursday or Friday. If I can't find a cheap ticket then I'll buy an expensive one and do the same. I would like to get there before the weekend to A. play some pickup ultime with the Bangkok crew and B. watch the Super Bowl in a city where I should easily be able to find it on Tv. Kunming lacks an expat population to drive western oriented bars that might carry it. Adios.

Kunming

I flew to Kunming from Beijing on Monday. Kunming is in Yunnan province which borders Vietnam. Dr. Yin met me at the airport and we went straight to this place, he told me it was the Agricultural Bank of China and to wait with his wife in the car. He came out and was like OK grab your stuff this is your hotel and told me to thank a friend of his who was there. So yeah, I'm staying in the bank's hotel. I'm being treated very well, always being treated, I never have the oppurtunity to pay.

 

The first day, he had one of his doctors, I think a resident, a 24 year old girl take me to a bus station to go to some nearby attraction, but on the way there he calls and says he couldn't arrange something and that she was supposed to take me around all day. So she got off work, and we went to Dian Chi, a large lake south of Kunming and took a boat to a mountain on the other side. The path on the way up the moutnain was all these stone steps, which I don't like because they are actually more work than just walking on a regular trail. The girl I was with got tired quickly and a little surprised at her situation changing from 'take this whitey to the bus station' to 'he wants to climb to the top of this mountain'. Oh well. She kept telling me to be careful while walking up these steps, which is the story of my time here with Chinese, always being told to be careful. Along the way were several little pagodas/temples/pavilions with buddha statues and the like. They look cool and at some points are carved into these steep rock faces but I question their genuineness as they all seem to be poured concrete that is painted over. I figure they are recreations of old structures that were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

 

Afterwards we ate some ethnic food, and it kicked my butt. I thought I had gotten tougher with regards to spicy food but man, this is a new breed. Apart from the spiciness it tastes really good. I think it has a lot of basil (maybe its cilantro) and lime.

 

Dr. Yin is a nice guy and his family is nice. The Chinese courtesy shows though, and to someone who is not used to it, it comes across as being treated like a baby. We all went out to dinner and the young female doctor ordered extra noodles for my soup and put them in my soup and there are all these small things that they do, like when we get ready to go somewhere they tell me OK we will go now and then they basically usher me towards the door, offering their hand like I need directions. And of course since I'm in China I am constantly told by every single person in the room to wear more clothing, so that I don't catch a cold. It's amusing, but you just smile, nodd, and say OK. But the weather here is so nice. Its fairly dry, I don't know what the temperature is but today at 3pm I walked around the city and was just smiling because the weather is so nice. The air quality is infinitely better than Beijing as well.

 

But I'm having fun, last night we went to a tea house after dinner and got a room and Dr. Yins friends came trickling in so there were a bunch of people there. We sat around and drank tea, all of the males except Dr. Yin smoked, (thats China) and later we drank beer and talked about random things like funny sayings in Chinese that I knew and how Chinese like to drink tea and beer.

 

 

Now for the Spring

So now that I'm basically done with my semester of studying Chinese
in Beijing, I look to the spring to plan what I'll do. I've been
having dreams where I've been back in the US or on my way back after
studying for however long it was at the point of the dream. I always
felt disappointed that I hadn't traveled to other parts of China and
Asia, so now I'm excited to do that. I will see how good I am at just
winging it.

I won't take too much stuff, I figure clothes, a camera, and a Lonely
Planet guidebook are the essentials. I want to be contained to a
backpack, Nisha said she did it so I can do it.

2 Objectives: a. Get to Bangkok Thailand by 16 February to play in an
ultimate frisbee hat tournament.
b. get to Kunming in the south of China by April to meet my family
for a week.

So heres the plan:

Buy a plane ticket to Kunming. Kunming is the capital of Yunnan
province. Yunnan province borders Vietnam to the south. In Kunming, a
doctor friend of my dad who studied his department at MCV for a year,
Dr. Yin, will receive me (don't know if he will house me or not) and
maybe show me around Kunming/Yunnan for a little while if I desire. I
will probably save the majority of that for April when I return to
Kunming to meet my family.

From Kunming I'll hop a train down into Vietnam. From there I'll
just do whatever looks cool, the Lonely Planet basically has me
covered. Its got what do do, where stay, where to eat, etc etc. So
I'll wander down through Vietnam, then over through Cambodia or Laos,
whichever is easier, and then get to Thailand.

February 17 is a hat tournament in Bangkok, and some of the crew from
Beijing will be down for that. Looking at accommodations for the
tournament, living in Thailand should be cheap. The nice option is a
weekend at what looks like a high class hotel in a studio for $60 for
the weekend. The cheap option is a guesthouse which has various
styles of rooms, about $13/night. Its a simple place but it looks
really nice. Looks better than the guesthouse we stayed at in Hong
Kong. That place was smallllll, and outside of the rooms fairly dirty.

After the tournament I really don't know what I'll do, I'll know at
the time of course. I'll do whatever the heck I feel like and then
return to Kunming by April. I'll meet my family and we should cover a
lot of ground during that week. I don't know what Kunming is like,
but it will be fun to spend time with my family coming to China,
after having been here for a while. I'm interested to compare Kunming
to Beijing.

After they leave I would like to head north and west to Sichuan
province and Tibet. Of course Lonely Planet has my back, with various
itineraries that take you on tours from point A to B. I watched a
movie that has won some awards recently. Its called Kekexili,
Mountain Patrol. Its about these guys in Tibet that form a patrol
that goes out and tracks poachers of the diminishing Tibetan
antelope. Its a great movie with some great shots of the Tibetan
wilderness. So I said I want to go there.

If I deem that I have time, I might even head further north to
China's western border, called XinJiang province. This borders
Kazakhstan and I have a feeling its completely different than the
east here in Beijing. I've seen it in some movies, and a friend of
mine is from there. I figure I should try to see as much as I can
while I'm here. Plus my favorite restaurant here is in my school. We
call it the Muslim place, but its basically food from XinJiang
province. So yeah.

Make it back to Beijing by early May to pick up stuff I left here,
buy more stuff to take home, and catch my flight on the 15th. But I
can change the date of my flight for only $25.........

By the way, since I don't plan on taking my computer with me, I will be using a different email address.
Please send all mail to gregericksen@gmail.com. I will still check the @virginia.edu mail but I much prefer the gmail account. Thanks.

Semester

So my semester of studying Chinese in Beijing is basically over. I
took my first two exams today and have a spoken one for ten minutes
tomorrow. Then some classes next week, finishing on Wednesday.

Last week I took the 汉语水平考试, hanyu shuiping kaoshi or HSK.
Its an assessment test for Chinese. It destroyed me, I didn't even
get a grade. Only one girl from my class got a grade, a very good one
at that, but she knows Cantonese and we all think she should be about
4 classes above us. The test is also not designed for someone who has
only studied one semester.

So I look at my progress and I feel like I have accomplished and
improved tons, but its a long road. I can now here and understand
everything my two teachers say. One teacher conducts class completely
in Chinese and I understand everything. The other one uses English
sometimes but I still understand all of his Chinese. They have very
good pronunciation and limit their vocabulary to what we know. With
other people it depends on how clear they speak. People are
different. I can hear some cab drivers even though they are
notoriously horrible. But this guard at my apartment and this
elevator girl, I dont even hear what they are saying until they say
it a few times. Its horrible. But neither of them move their lips
when they speak. When I say hear, that means that I could repeat the
majority of what they just said back to them. By understand I mean
understand what they are saying and translate to English.

So another semester would do wonders for my Chinese, but I just don't
want to stay here in Beijing. If I were to stay, I might hire a tutor
and pay her, or come up with some more individually tailored learning
method. I didn't like dividing time with 15 other classmates. My
friends found that a group of 5 is acceptable. Chinese friends are
useful and you learn a lot from them but their English is so good,
and after 4-6 hours of class a day I feel saturated with Chinese and
just want to speak English. One thing I wish I had done was use a
tape recorder on a regular basis. I never got to because I didn't
feel like buying one and my friend was going to lend his to me when
he finished recording some tapes to his computer but we just kept
putting it off and never got around to it. I wanted to record a
conversation between 2 of my Chinese friends and then analyze it later.

I feel sad to leave my friends and my class, but my class would be
different next semester and it wouldn't be the same. And I have been
having dreams ever since I came to China where I found myself at home
in the US or on my way home after however long I'd been in China at
that point, and I always felt disappointed that I hadn't stayed
longer. I just had that dream last night, that I had gone home right
after the semester, but I had no stories to tell (even though I do).
I felt like I missed out on seeing the rest of China. So thats what I
plan to do now.

Its interesting getting ready to leave Beijing. The date came up
pretty quick because I wasn't exactly looking forward to finishing, I
sort of liked class. But its weird leaving a place and thinking you
might never come back here, at least not in the same time period,
when the same people you know live here etc. Just because its so far
away from the US. Any other place that I'd left I'd always felt like,
oh I can just go back here if I want too, or I might end up back
here. But I would like to come back if I can, even though this city
isn't that great in itself. I'm interested to see how the Olympics
change it, because we see tons of plans for Olympic stuff but not
much has started yet. However the national bird of China is the crane
and there are literally thousands of cranes putting up new buildings
in the city. Its remarkable how much construction there is. It will
be a much different city soon, in some ways hopefully.

New Year's

On New Years a bunch of my friends went to a place called Hutong
Pizza (Alley Pizza) Its way back in this Hutong area where the old
style Beijing houses are. It was really cool inside and was good pizza.

Later we went to a party at this place called Embassy House which is
a large apartment building that looks like a hotel. On the first few
floors it has a gym, a pool, a library, some party rooms and a
kitchen. A lot of foreign diplomat types live there. There are two
students at my school from the country of Tonga and about 20 or so
Tongans in Beijing. The two students are the kids of the Ambassador
and military advisor from Tonga here. They had a Halloween party at
this place and it was fun, so a lot of people came to their new years
party. It was all students, a ton from BLCU and since we paid a bit
of money to get in, we exercised our right to drink alcohol in China.
But not too much. It was fun, we had two countdowns 5 minutes apart,
I thought one came early so maybe that was a false start. Later that
night a few of the parents came back and I talked to this one older
guy from Manhattan in a pin stripe suit and another dad that I met at
the Halloween party. They are a fun group.

We had two days off from school so me and some friends went into the
city. First we went to Tiananmen to try to see Mao at his mausoleum.
But it was a holiday so it was closed. Then we went to the National
Museum. Before we went in some girls started talking to us, all
friendly like, with decent english etc. Then they said they would
take us through the museum and that the museum was free. So we walked
to the museum but go past the ticket window and into this side
entrance that says China National Museum Gallery. This is all in the
same building as the museum. It was these two rooms full of pieces of
art, obviously for sale, and the girls were telling us about the art
and saying we "could add it to our collection". Anyways I sent my
friend a text message that said "do you want to go to the real museum
now?"

So we paid 30 RMB (<4$), foreign students don't get a discount but
Chinese do. We went in and walked around. I was really not impressed.
It was a huge building but there were only 3 small exhibits. One of a
famous mariner from China who sailed to places as far as Madagascar.
That was cool. There was some other exhibit of arts and crafts but
the Shanghai museum was infinitely better. Then there was a wax
figure display of all these national figures, guys from ancient time
periods, all the dynasties, etc, and then some famous people from
recent history, like David Beckham, Michael Jordan next to Yao Ming,
Einstein, Karl Marx and Engels etc. I figure about 15% of the space
in this museum building had exhibits. The National Museum, next to
Tiananmen square.

Then we walked looking for a street that was supposedly an arts and
crafts street. I wanted to get some calligraphy written to scan into
my computer to use for thank you cards. It turns out to be a
calligraphist is like being a trained artist, every place I went had
all this calligraphy and when I was like I want some written, they
were like uhhhh, I'll call the artist but he sleeps during the day.
So I found a Japanese guy in my school who will do it for me.
While looking for this street we wandered through some hutongs, a
network of alleys that have doors on the outside leading to housing
on the inside. Some pictures will be up soon.