The End

As of today, I have been in China for six months, and I'm going home in nine days.

Shanghai was a lot of fun, but it made me realize just how much I miss everybody back home. Two days of Gabe, Kelsey, Richard, and Extine... incredible.

People keep asking me about how I feel about returning home, and I honestly cannot come up with an answer. I know that I'm expected to have "mixed emotions" on the subject, but I've come to realize that I have almost no emotions concerning going home. One reason is that I have exams all this week, but the other reason is that I cannot imagine what it will be like at home.


Sorry I haven't updated much for the past few weeks. Busy Busy.

元阳和建水 aka RICE TERRACES

My weekend trip to Jianshui and the Yuanyang rice terraces was exhausting but totally worth it. I'll let the pictures do the talking.

First glimpse of the rice terraces

 

Just before the sunrise, on top of a mountain

Right as the sun began to rise

The terraces reflect the sky!

The obligatory Liming picture :)

Sunrise :)

Close up view of the terraces

Interviews

The opportunities that I have here never cease to amaze me. Our one-on-one final research paper is due in a few weeks, so everybody is scrambling to get in interviews etc... My paper has to do with education of female ethnic minorities. (It sounds better in Chinese, I promise). Anyway, I interviewed a guy on Friday who is the first person of the Nu (怒) ethnic group to ever go to graduate school. There are only about 20,000 Nu people in the world, and the population is clustered in 3 small villages in Yunnan. They are very very poor.

This guy I interviewed can speak three different ethnic minority languages as well as Mandarin and a tiny bit of English. His sister is in middle school and will be dropping out before high school to find work somewhere. The role of women in Nu education is solely to teach their children their old traditions/religious rites. For example, if you sleep on the ground outside of your house, you have to go back and check that your soul is not stuck where you slept.

Tomorrow, I am going to a school full of various ethnic minorities to interview both teachers and students. I'm a little nervous, but I'm also really excited.

Richard came to visit this weekend. It was a blast!

38 days?

With only 38 days left in the motherland, I am experiencing some pretty serious mixed feelings. On one hand I'm thinking, "God, 38 days til I get to see Matthew? That is wayyyyyy too long." But on the other hand, I'm so sad. I've been here since early June. China is what I'm used to. Life is so different back in the states, and I already know that I'll be experiencing some serious reverse culture shock.


So, in order to fully appreciate the month that I have left here, I've decided to make a to-do list. Some of the things I've done before, some I haven't. Suggestions are welcome!


1. Eat hotpot.

Last time I had hotpot was in July

2. Visit Chinese classrooms to talk to the kids.
3. Drink Beerlao
4. Get a massage
5. Hike up a mountain
6. Visit rice terraces (already planned!)
7. Go to Shanghai (already planned!)
8. Learn some more Kunming dialect
9. Eat dinner with my roommate at least four times
10. Go to the flower/bird market in Kunming.
11. Go a day without complaining about anything
12. Find a gift for Matthew
13. Eat an egg pancake at an obscene hour of the evening/morning
14. Jog around Cuihu (the lake near our school)
15. Go to one of Kunming's museums

I have a really exciting month ahead. This coming weekend, Richard is coming back to Kunming! The next weekend, I'll be going to Yuanyang's rice terraces with the group (including my roommate). And the weekend after that, I'm going to Shanghai to visit Gabe, Kelsey, Bibba, and Richard. I've never been to Shanghai before, so I'm pretty excited. 

Have I really been in China for over five months? That is insane.

 

苗族 (Hmong) Village

 On Sunday we went to a Christian Hmong village to celebrate their "Thanksgiving" festival. It's probably the poorest place I've ever been. Everybody sat on the ground outside of the church to listen to the choir sing. Chickens were running around everywhere and so were kids. Every house has corn drying out on the roof to save for the winter. For lunch, we basically had pieces of pork fat, rice, and some cabbage. It was a humbling experience. Also, there was not a single person there taller than I. Most of the women were far below five feet tall.
I am very thankful to be studying in Kunming where I have opportunities to take day trips to places like this. In Beijing, everything was new and everyone was Han. Here, I get to listen to tons of different languages and experience (to what is still a fairly shallow extent) other cultures. I think it's cool that the Hmong that escaped Laos and came to the US after the Vietnam War have, for the most part, not accepted Christianity, whereas the Hmong in China center their lives around the church.

pictures finally

pathetic attempt at getting a jumping picture

Jiuzhaigou

Jiuzhaigou is easily the most beautiful place I have ever been. On Sunday we took a ten hour bus ride there and spent two nights with a Tibetan family on top of a mountain. We learned  a lot. For example, just because it isn't snowing in Chengdu doesn't mean it isn't snowing a few hours north/10,000 feet above Chengdu. I'll explain more soon.

Anyway, we got to the family's home and the grandmother cooked us dinner while we played with the grandson. He's 2 and a half and speaks fluent Mandarin and Tibetan. The grandmother's Chinese was about on par with mine and Alyssa's, so communicating was not difficult. We drank tea and ate their homemade bread topped with their own homemade honey. Dinner consisted of potatoes, more bread and honey, dried yak meat, and rice. Afterward, the oldest son came home and served us some of their (homemade) barley wine. It tasted a lot like some of the alcohol I tried when I was in Laos. (BTW, at this point still no snow).

After the barley wine was gone, we climbed up to the third floor of their cabin to find our room and went to sleep. I must have been really cold all night because I had multiple dreams about blankets, and when I woke up in the morning, I felt like I was going to die. No heat in the cabin, and there was a permanently cracked window in our room.

We ate breakfast at 7:00 am, before the sun came up. We had eggs, hot bread with honey, and (ugh) yak butter tea. Yak butter tea=liquid bleu cheese (basically). When we walked outside, we realized that the entire mountain was covered in snow and that the snow was still coming down pretty hard. And that's how our 8 hour hike started.

That's all I have time to write about today, but I will put pictures up as soon as my internet is better. I would recommend checking out my latest facebook pictures, if you're interested.

Chengdu: First Day

Alyssa and I caught a cab at 5:45 this morning for the airport. By 10:30, we were settled into our hostel in Chengdu! Our hostel is in a great location, similar to the hutongs in Beijing. For lunch we had 担担面 (Sichuan Noodles) and 包子 (Baozi). The food here is super spicy and super delicious. After lunch we walked around a bit and watched a man make dragons/flowers out of melted sugar by dripping it onto wax paper.









After exploring our neighborhood, we took a cab to the major shopping area. It was packed, but I guess this is a city of 9 million people.... Hopefully tomorrow we'll go see some pandas. Cross your fingers for good weather for us. Also, Gabe and Kelsey are meeting us tomorrow! I love hanging out with people from school in random Chinese cities.

Acupuncture and Chinese Herbs

I've been feeling a bit off lately, so I decided (with the encouragement of Matthew) to try out traditional Chinese medicine. After discussing my symptoms with the doctor, she stared at my tongue and took my pulse like five times. She then wrote out the longest prescription I have ever seen. The product of this prescription was nine little bags of bitter, brown liquid. I am to drink one bag after every meal for the next three days.

After she wrote the prescription, we began the process of acupuncture. I was freaking out, but after a few minutes, there were 14 needles sticking out of various places in my body. It really hurt when she put the needles between my big toe and the toe next to it as well as between my thumbs and fingers. They stopped hurting almost immediately though. I was also pretty creeped out by the needles in my elbows. After 25 minutes, she took the needles out and gave me instructions for drinking my herbs. I have to put the bag in boiling water before I drink it.

Results? I'm sleeping better. I went into my second acupuncture appointment today, meaning I currently have 28 holes in my skin. I'm going to stick with it for a while.

Side note: I had the most awesome cab driver today! We talked about French colonialists in Kunming and in Louisiana for like thirty minutes!

Love y'all!

Dynamic Yunnan

Last night we went to dinner at a restaurant called "La Gare du Sud"-- the building (or rather buildings) used to be a French train station. It was beautiful. The food was typical Yunnan style: lots of rice noodles, lots of mushrooms, and lots of fried dough.

After dinner, we walked to the theater to see Dynamic Yunnan, a beautiful musical that meshes together a lot of the cultures of Yunnan's 25 ethnic minority groups. I know what you're thinking, smiling minorities waving and dancing? come on... but this was not like any of the other "minority spectacles" that I've been subjected to in this country. The costumes, dancing, and music were all unbelievable, and everything was a lot more contemporary than I was expecting. They even had a scene where a bunch of teenagers of the Dai ethnic minority get drunk and dance and flirt until the sun comes up and all of the males have to carry all of the females back home. The whole time, everybody is singing traditional Dai folk songs. There was a scene with over 60 drums on stage, one of them being played by a three year old girl. The same three year old girl also sang a children's folk song toward the end. The most beautiful part of the show was probably the Peacock "epilogue" where a woman wore a beautiful dress that resembled peacock feathers and used her hands and arms to make the most beautiful/sophisticated ...shadow puppets I have ever seen.

http://www.dynamicyunnan.com/en/intro.htm

Check out the website if you are interested. They actually do shows all around the world.

I would see this a million times.

Lazy Sunday Afternoons

I've definitely been failing at updating my blog with interesting stuff. I was hoping that I'd be able to tell you all about the Christian Miao Village later tonight, but due to horrible weather conditions, our trip was canceled. ;_;

I've felt a twinge of homesickness lately, so to cheer myself up I've compiled a list of things that I'm going to miss about China when I come home in two months.

1. Egg Pancakes. In Qingdao, egg pancakes ran about 1.5kuai. Last night I walked all the way to Kundu (the bar area of Kunming) with two guys from my program just to get egg pancakes. Turns out in Kunming (or Kundu at 2:00 am, rather) they are 5 kuai. It's totally worth it though. The woman/man at the stand pours about a million gallons of oil onto a skillet followed by dough for a crepe/pancakeish thing. After a few seconds, she tears a hole in the middle of the pancake and cracks an egg into it. After it's all done cooking, spicy redbean paste is brushed onto it, and you are guaranteed a fabulous five minutes in heaven followed by an entire night of heartburn.

2. Kites. I know we have kites in America, but you really don't understand how wonderful kites are until you've been to China. It's totally normal to see 20 or so old men flying kites next to a 1000 year old building. Here's a picture that I took in Xi'an during the summer of 2009. You can see the kites to the left.








3. Vegetables and Fruits. The vegetables/fruits here are so wonderful and so cheap.

4. Shrubs being used as brooms.

5. KTV (Karaoke). Yes, I know that we have Karaoke in America, but it's not cool in America. I don't know what I'm going to do when I'm back home and it's a Saturday and I can't sing my heart out to R. Kelly or whatever disturbing music is available in the KTV computer.

I will be adding to this list soon.

Catching Up: KTV etc...

With Alyssa at the Tibetan Restaurant

 We are really getting along as a group, and we've all gotten close to all of our Chinese roommates. Also, karaoke is huge in China. HUGE.

Karaoke with classmates- we get really into it.

Me and 李明 at Kundu

I have a week and a half before midterms, and then Alyssa and I are going to Chengdu for a week! I'm really excited. Also, I'm going to a Christian Miao (Hmong) village on Sunday! I will be sure to take lots of pictures to post.  

La Vie Quotidienne Part 2

I have officially been in Kunming for an entire month, and I'm really beginning to develop a nice routine for myself. Every day I wake up when it's still dark outside (thank you, China for only having one timezone and therefore making my mornings creepy) and eat some fruit while scrambling to get my homework done before class (some things never change). My walk to class takes about fifteen minutes and it's beautiful. There are flowers everywhere. After class, I usually go to a *gasp* western restaurant for lunch and either return to the classroom building for one on one or go take a nap at the dorms. I've gotten in the habit of going jogging (walking briskly, really) around Cui Hu (Green Lake) which is near the classroom building. If for no other reason, it's to see precious old Chinese men flying kites and old women line dancing with scarves in their hands. The rest of my day is usually filled with too much coffee and too much homework.

Qiuqiu, Tianqi, and Detong at Cui Hu

I guess the point of this post was bringing up the old men flying kites at Cui Hu. It is so cute. It reminds me of the old men who go to Handy Andy's every day and drink coffee (<3 Doug)--just a Chinese version.



Tonight I'm going to a 傣族 restaurant, and then Alyssa and I are going to the airport to pick up Richard! Tomorrow is a holiday! I love three day weekends.

Tibetan Cuisine

Wouldn't recommend it. The food was actually pretty good, but the beverages... Yak milk tea....aka hot liquid bleu cheese.

The restaurant we went to was super cheesy. The waiters and waitresses did performances and sang while we ate.

:)

If you want a postcard, email me your address. :)

Hejing Guzhen (黑井古镇）

This weekend my roommate, Alyssa, Alyssa's roommate, and I took a train to the old "salt city" Heijing Guzhen, three and a half hours north of Kunming. It is one of the quietest, most beautiful places I have ever been. Also, the train tickets were 29 kuai (aka $4.25)!!! We took the high speed train so that it would be a three and a half hour ride as opposed to a five hour ride. On the train, there was a little boy who had never seen a white person before. Every time he looked at me, he started giggling hysterically, and during the last hour or so of the ride, his mother brought him over to me. He gave me a tomato :) So cute.

We got to Heijing just before noon on Saturday and took a 马车 (basically a horse and buggy) to the old town.  Heijing is called "the thousand year old city of salt." (I love the nicknames China comes up with for its cities and towns). Here are a few pictures:

Our hotel!

A tribute to the workers who carried the salt from the water

Our ride

With my roommate!

A picture is worth a thousand words

Fu Xian Lake

This weekend we went to Fuxian Lake. It is super big and super deep. It spans 212 square kilometers and gets up to 155 meters deep. It has two fairly large islands etc... It was beautiful, and filled with tourists. We were the only non-Chinese tourists though, which made it really fun. I would love to go back sometime when it's a little warmer. One of the most exciting parts of the trip would have to be watching an old lady slaughter a giant fish on the sidewalk, put it into a bucket, and serve us fish soup twenty minutes later. The streets are covered in fish scales. I should probably get back to studying, but here are a few pictures from the trip!

Alyssa and me

Mountain overlooking the lake

Routine

I might have gone crazy. My schedule was originally supposed to include my one-on-one class, Kunming Studies, Minorities in China, and Contemporary Issues in China. Sounds like my kind of classes, hm? I don't really know what got into me, but I decided I wanted more of a challenge....so I switched from my minorities class to CHINESE BUSINESS.

My schedule goes like this:
Monday: 8:30-10:30 Kunming studies (15 people)
                1:15-2:45 One-on-one
Tuesday: 8:30-10:30 Business (5 people)
                10:30-12:00 Contemporary Issues in China (5 people)
Wednesday: 10:30-12:00 Kunming Studies (just 4 of us)
Thursday: 8:30-10:30 Business (5 people)
                 10:30-12:00 Contemporary Issues in China (5 people)
                 1:15-2:45 One-on-one
Friday: Test (or nothing at all)

My Kunming studies class on Wednesday is going to be awesome! It's Alyssa, a Middlebury Student named Nick, a Yale graduate named Eli, and myself (some of the coolest people in the program if you ask me ^_^).  My one-on-one class is a research project on Chinese education problems, policy reforms, and ethnic minority education issues. My teacher is way indie, and he has a purse that is about ten times more fabulous than mine. He is going to take me to minority schools in villages outside of Kunming as well as some schools within the city proper! I'm super excited.

More exciting things: Last night I went with my roommate and her boyfriend to eat Kunming's traditional noodles. It's very similar to hotpot. I'm going to plagiarize (wikitravel is wonderful) to explain: "Over-the-Bridge Rice Noodles (过桥米线; guoqiao mixian) is a typical Yunnan local flavor that could only be tasted in some parts of Yunnan. The Over the Bridge Rice Noodles has along history and it carries with itself a vivid love story. This famous dish consists of several courses and a big bowl of chicken soup with very thick oil on top to keep the heat for cooking the food items, including raw pork, cooked chicken pieces, pork liver, slices of squid and slices of carp for the first course to be dipped into the boiling hot soup. Vegetables are then added afterwards as the second course, and the rice noodles follow as the last course."

Alyssa and I have enjoyed exploring the area surrounding our dorms/classroom building. I'm currently sitting in a French Cafe, drinking a Diabolo Menthe. Though I came here a few days ago to get my BEERLAO! There are a ton of great Indian and Thai restaurants, and I can't even begin to explain how good the western food is in my area. I will gain 5 million pounds this semester...in a good way....maybe. Also, I had watermelon bubble tea for three kuai the other day (three kuai= forty-four cents). !!!!! Kunming dialect is the most ridiculous language I have ever heard...I don't know what it sounds like...but it certainly doesn't sound like Chinese.

Also: RICHARD IS COMING TO VISIT IN 23 DAYS! It will be a wonderful reunion: Tingting, Richard, and myself. The weather here is way better than Nanjing :)  Bibba and Danny are visiting a few weeks after Richard! I love that I can meet up with a bunch of friends in the middle of nowhere China. 

My roommate and I are supposed to be going on a weekend trip in two and a half weeks. It's going to be awesome!

Love and miss you all! 

roommate, Beerlao and 李明

熊鑫 (my roommate) and me

BEERLAO!

Me, 李明 (Parsons' roommate from last semester)，and Alyssa

南京—》昆明

Alyssa and I flew from Nanjing to Kunming yesterday, and I have already fallen in love with the city. It's about 65 degrees here, and our campus is beautiful and full of flowers. There is also a great street full of Thai and Indian restaurants less than a five minutes' walk from my dorm. My roommate is great. Her major is international relations, and she's obsessed with Southeast Asia. (her boyfriend is from Cambodia). She and I are currently laughing at gender stereotypes in China as well. I'm thinking she's pretty 开放, as far as it goes.

I might be tempted to complain about the fact that I don't have air conditioning in my room, but...oh wait.... the weather is perfect. Thus far, my only complaint is the fact that we can't flush toilet paper down the toilet, but something tells me I'll live.

I have to talk about it being a small world again... there are two Tulane students in my program of 15 kids. Also, Alyssa and I met up with a friend of hers from her Princeton summer program who is doing research in Kunming. It turns out his translator used to be a teacher at ACC. I will never escape ACC.

Sorry I don't have any pictures yet. I'll try to put some up soon! Love y'all!

南京（Nanjing）

I will be very sad when my vacation in Nanjing is over (on Wednesday), but I am looking forward to 65 degree weather in Kunming. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've done very little touristy stuff here. Most days consist of Alyssa, Cooper, and I walking to Nanjing University to meet up with Richard and Bibba. Then we get lunch and, if I have my way, ice cream. We usually goof off or run errands with the boys for their apartments etc.. until dinner time.

Last night we went to 1912, (for those of you who don't know) the Sanlitun/Bourbon Street of Nanjing. Within an hour, I ran into one of my ACC Beijing classmates!

Danny at 1912! Apparently he is doing the same program as Bibba this semester!

The group in Nanjing!

 I did a few things last night that I certainly wasn't proud of....such as dancing with middle-aged Chinese men (mimicking their hilarious dance moves) among others. I'm looking forward to the next two days! It's been a great vacation!

Bye Bye, Beijing.

Today around 9:00 am, Ben and I (the two remaining ACC kids in Beijing) left for the airport. My bags were overweight :) but things went relatively smoothly. I arrived in time to meet up with Richard and look at the flagship offices and stuff. It's good to see where I will presumably be in two years' time.

Nanjing reminds me a lot of New Orleans, in that it feels like New Orleans in late August right before a huge thunderstorm....all of the time. I personally prefer the humidity over Beijing's smog, though. Nanjing also seems to have a lot more character. I'm looking forward to a week of fairly relaxed exploring/ a day trip to Suzhou (maybe).

I'll keep you updated!

Margaritas

I wasn't kidding about having the best margaritas in my life. Last night it was two-for-one, but we didn't know about it until the waitress brought 8 to us.

DONE

Let's recap my summer for a moment.
I've gone from:
Hanging out with Mom in fancy Beijing.










to hanging out with my classmates in fancy-ish Beijing










to dying from the schoolwork










to eating hotpot in Datong with the Indiana boys










to dying










to being done with finals!
Seriously I took this picture as soon as I got back to my room after taking my last test. I'm exhausted. I can't remember the last time I washed my hair. But I'm done with the most academically demanding two months of my life (thus far). All I can do is smile. :) In the past 53 days, I have written over 10,000 words in formal papers. I have learned 3,000+ characters. I have given ten speeches, four of them lasting thirty minutes each. And then there's all that homework and reading and stuff.

In addition, I've ridden two ridiculous overnight trains. I finally understand Beijing dialect. I've had the best margarita in my life (in China? yes). I got to hang out with Amy all the time! I've amassed an impressive collection of wallets and bags from the pearl market and the silk market. I've met up with one friend from high school, four fellow Ole Miss students, and two Ole Miss professors- all in Beijing. I've gone out to eat with my Chinese teachers eight times. And I even rediscovered my lost love for dumplings.

All in all, I'd say that ACC was worth every penny. Also, here's a picture of all of the ACC students and teachers levels 2-4. I didn't know everyone very well though because the fourth year class only had 15 or so students, and we all know that I'm not the most social of butterflies.




What now? I'm staying in the dorms here until Sunday afternoon. I'm staying in a hotel in Wangfujin for three days, and then I'm off to Nanjing!

Love y'all!

hm...

I write like
Ursula K. Le Guin

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