hello! nihao!

Of the six trips I had planned between Dali and Kunming I have now completed 5.  When I next go back to Kunming for my second MSG, I won't be coming back to Dali.  This week and next are my last weeks here at the Blackburn's house.  It's hard to believe my time here is already half over.  I've really been enjoying my Chinese senior trip, and I'll miss the food, the culture, and the people I've met here.  Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my day-to-day schedule here in Dali.  I go running every morning, sometimes with my cousin, sometimes alone.  The weather here is beautiful for running, for being outside.  It's already much warmer than when I got here.  The Blackburn's house helper, Grace, makes us Chinese lunch everyday, and after lunch I have been studying Chinese with my uncle and his colleague Molly, whose village I visited a month ago.  I've learned a lot, in light of the fact that I've only had 5 lessons.  I believe I'm up to like 40 or 50 words and comprehension of quite a few more.  I try to do homework too, but it's pretty hard to focus on schoolwork.  I'm keeping mostly caught up though, which I'd say is an accomplishment.  My adversaries are strong- senioritis and the excitement of being in a foreign country.

Interspersed with the daily schedule I've been able to do some pretty fun things.  Last weekend I went with Aden and Maggie to Permeate, a youth retreat for the Kunming youth group.  I spent a lot of time with the kids I'd met at the MSG, and got to know them a lot better.  It was a really fun trip.  The weather was beautiful- hot and sunny- and we stayed in an Asian hotel by a man-made lake with a sandy beach and luscious green grass.  I had my first experience with buffet-style noodles for breakfast.  The first time I tried to get a bowl of noodles, I wound up putting far too much soy sauce, but it still tasted pretty good.  I did much better after that.  Noodles are apparently a typical Chinese breakfast fare, but several of the foreign kids at Permeate weren't too fond of the custom.  I thought it was delicious!  We weren't the only group staying at the hotel, and the beach was one of the only ones nearby, so the hotel (Fascinating Nature Garden, it was called) was pretty crowded.  A lot of local Chinese would make day-trips to the lake, setting up tents, going swimming, and using umbrellas to keep the sun off.  In China, it is the height of fashion to be pale; no one would dream of tanning or laying out in the sun.  In fact, most lotions, shampoos, etc. come with "skin whitening agents" to try to lighten Asian skin.  There were also a huge number of brides having their wedding photos taken by the lake.  It would have been a very picturesque location, were it not so windy.  The poor brides were trying to keep their dresses smooth and their hair pretty while the photographers ran around snapping pictures and the wind blew everything around.  The wind was also annoying for those of us trying to play poker in our free time.  We had to find locations sheltered from the wind before the cards would stay where we put them.

Another thing I did last week was go out to dinner with a large group of foreigners in Dali.  We had those Chinese dumplings whose name escapes me.  They're a lot like potstickers, except filled with all sorts of different meats and vegetables.  Everyone makes up their own dipping sauce out of soy sauce, dark vinegar, ginger, spicy dried pepper, oil, and whatnot.  I really like those things!  I also have found that I really like eggplant.  I don't know that I'd ever had eggplant before coming here.  It's not really something we eat too often in America, besides in eggplant parmesan from Italian restaurants.  But man is it delicious!  I would love, before I leave, to learn at least one way to cook it, so that when I come home I can have it there.  It has a slimy texture, but a fantastic taste.  Really though, all vegetables taste good here.  Something about the way they're cooked, vegetables are delectable in China.  I saw Grace, the Blackburn's house helper, in the kitchen yesterday, preparing a chicken.  It was strange to see a dead chicken, with it's head and feet and all, being prepared in a normal kitchen.  I mean, it was weird in the village but I just sorta accepted it because it was a village and that's different than a normal house, right?  So it was just strange watching her washing this plucked dead chicken in my aunt and uncle's kitchen sink.  Of course, it was also weird seeing plucked dead chickens lying in the meat area of Wal-Mart too.  My aunt took me to Wal-Mart last week, and in some ways it was familiar, but in others it was totally different.  Like the dead chicken, and the huge pig thighs, complete with hooves.  And the abundance of vegetables that I've never seen or heard of before.  And all the t-shirts with English phrases that make no sense at all (apparently, this phenomenon of poor English translation is called "Chinglish").  Another difference about shopping here is that you only can buy what you can carry at one time.  Because people don't own cars but take taxis or buses, you can't just bring a cart out to your trunk and fill it with groceries and drive it home.  You have to carry it all back home.  Plus, most people live several floors up, and there are almost never elevators here.  So if you're on the seventh floor (like our dorm at the MSG) and you have groceries, you have to carry it all the way up.  If you had two trips, you'd have to carry it all up seven flights, walk back down seven flights, then come all the way back up.  So people pretty much only buy a few things at a time.

This weekend Maggie, Aden and I are going to visit some friends of theirs in Leijiong, a city north of here.   The area is supposed to be very beautiful, and, as it is something of a tourist area, will have a lot of opportunity for shopping and gawking and the like.  Although, last night I heard there is currently an uncontrolled forest fire in the area.  I wonder how that will affect our trip...  So far, it's still on.  Today, I believe Aunt Laura is taking us out shopping.  I'm hoping to buy some DVDs and boots.  Everyone here wears such cute boots, I want a pair of my own!  Next week my grandparents are coming in from California.  They'll be traveling with us to Xi'an and Beijing after MSG at the end of March.  That will be the end of my time here in China, and as excited as I am to see the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, it will be sad to have to say goodbye.  Or, in proper Putonghua (Mandarine), to say "zaijian."

Fireworks, Buses, and Really Long School Days

Dali Old Town pretty much looked like I remembered: elaborately carved Asian architecture covered in a layer of grime and full of vendors selling everything from upscale clothes to stone vases to hand-dyed tablecloths.  It's really a beautiful tourist set-up.  Narrow cobbled streets intersecting each other, lined with legitimate shops and hopeful, roadside tables spread with everything from antique coins to silver costume jewelry.  As the center of the area's tourist district, the culture is a blend of Asian, Indian, European, and American.  To me, it was exhilarating.  The babble of languages, the colorful array of merchandise, the lovely arched roofs and ornately carved doors darkened by years of smoke, dirt, and smog.  But to my cousins, I'm afraid being a tourist is a pretty miserable experience.  The locals see a white face and assume "stupid foreigner, I can really scam these ones."  My cousins have to display an impressive array of bargaining ability, Chinese language skills, and local credentials before the shopkeepers are willing to take them seriously enough to give them a fair price on their wares.  We attract a lot of stares, especially outside of the tourist areas, in their hometown of Xiaguan.  It's a bit strange to be the object of so much curiosity and attention, but I've found in general that if I smile at them, they smile cheerfully right back and then go about their business as usual.

Sunday after church Aden, Maggie, and I got on the bus for Kunming, where there Modular Study Group (MSG) meets once a month.  Because the MSG meets only one week out of four, they meet each day for nine and a half hours.  The out-of-towners (comprising of me, the Blackburns, and a Singaporean girl named Jessica) stay with a British family called the Mathers.  We eat breakfast with them at 7 and leave for the MSG.  We get back to the Mathers' between 6:15 and 6:30, after a long, crowded, and incredibly jerky journey on public bus 181, just in time to join them for dinner.  In the evenings I Skype in to my physics class as usual.  It makes for a pretty long day.  I wasn't sure how useful I could be here, or what it would even be like.  There are about 15 or 20 high schoolers that meet here.  The school is in an apartment on the 7th floor of a complex here in Kunming.  The first day their teacher, Mr. DeMoss, told me what some of his classes were doing and asked if I'd be willing to help teach a chapter in both Geometry and Chemistry.  I like to think I've been helpful.  In any case, this week Mr. DeMoss hasn't had to spend nearly as much time running back and forth between his two math classes and two science classes, both which meet simultaneously.  Today's their test on the chapters I taught, so I suppose the grades will show how effective I've been at communicating the information. Today is the last day of MSG for the month, which means tomorrow morning we can take the bus back to Xiaguan.  Tonight, we're going to a youth group of a bunch of kids from the Kunming area.  Most kids who live in Kunming attend the Kunming International School, so there will be a lot of kids I haven't met before.  But that's nothing new, haha.  Last night the city of Kunming was lit by the lights of a hundred fireworks.  As the last night of Spring Festival, the two weeks after Chinese New Year, last night marked the last night it was legal to light fireworks in the cities.  The holidays are officially over for the Chinese, which means schools and work all start back up again after their New Year's breaks.  All the business that have been closed since I've been here will open back up, and hopefully I can get some of my shopping done.  The week after next we're spending some time in Leijiong (I have no idea how to spell that properly...), a tourist city north of Dali.  I hear there's some great shopping there too!  Can't wait!
~Monica

Living in China

I know it's only been a few days, but it turned out I had another convenient opportunity to use the VPN at the neighbor's house.  So, I suppose it's time for a short update.  All the rules still apply- pictures take too long, this whole thing took forever to load in the first place, I can't promise when I'll next be on... You get the idea.

Over the past few days, I've been establishing the schedule that I will hold for most of my time here.  Wake up and work out in the morning with my aunt, breakfast, shower, do schoolwork.  Go out for lunch, or eat leftovers.  Do schoolwork.  Have dinner.  Watch a movie or hang out with my cousins.  Get on Skype and go to Physics class.  Go to bed.  Not a bad schedule.  It's full-time school at the Blackburn's house now- my cousins have even more schoolwork than me to keep them busy.  But we still have time to do fun things.  We've gone out to lunch several times this week to small restaurants around their complex.  Noodles, fried rice, Chinese raviolis (as they were described to me.  I can't remember what they're called).  So good.  Yesterday, Maggie, Aden and I went to the Bird and Flower Market.  Basically, the markets around here are content-specific.  So the Bird and Flower Market sells pots, plants, dogs, fish, fishing supplies, birds, gerbils...  Anything alive or having to do with living things.  I've also been to the fruits and vegetables market and the hardware market.  I hope to find the clothes market soon.  Everyone here wears such adorable high heeled boots, I can't wait to get a pair!  Today, we rode our bikes up the hill to a really fabulous piece of construction- a glass tower, Space Age looking.  It was built by the government to serve some unspecified purpose, but I think it would have made a fabulous viewing area.  Sorta like going to the top of the Empire State Building or Rockefeller Center, just to look around.  It had a great panoramic view of the city.  But it was decreed "bad luck" when it disobeyed some rule of fung shue and several construction workers had accidents, so the building was never used or even completed.  Such a waste of money, space, and construction.  It was really a gorgeous building.  But that's the power of superstition at work.  Too bad, really.  Tomorrow, we're taking the afternoon off to go to Old Dali and visit a friend of the Blackburn's who has a personal library we can use.  Hopefully I'll have a chance to do a bit of tourist shopping in Dali, and go out for dinner.  Exciting!  That's pretty much what's going on so far.  I understand we leave Sunday for Kunming to go to the co-op.  I'll try to keep you posted- thanks for keeping up with me.  Can't wait to show some pictures!
~Monica

A Week in a Village

You don't even want to KNOW how long it's taken me to get this posted.  It's been 45 minutes thus far, and it's not even uploaded yet.  I apologize for the time gap between entries- China blocks a large quantity of websites, blogger being one of them.  Facebook is another.  So, to update this blog I have to visit a friend's house with a VPN and suffer through the slow loading process.  So I'll have to make this a good one.  Oh, and it would take too long to put in pictures, so you'll have to wait till I get home for those.

Well, to begin, I arrived in Kunming safely on the night of the 28th (China time) and my aunt met me at the airport and took me to a friend's house for the night.  The next day we took a bus to Dali and arrived at my aunt's house.  My cousins and I took a short trip out to buy a plunger, so I got a small opportunity to see some of the city before we left for the village. We left on the afternoon of the 30th and took a bus to a city where we met Molly and her family.  Molly is a Lalo woman who speaks Lalo (her minority language), English, and Mandarine, and who works for my aunt and uncle.  We then took a second bus to her village.  From the bus stop to Molly's house we had to walk about an hour.  Typical Chinese village houses are built around a central courtyard.  There is usually a barn or stable on one side, a kitchen on another, rooms on another, and a fence making the fourth.  Meals are served on low square tables, everyone sitting on low benches.  Everyone gets a bowl of rice and the dishes are placed in the center of the table, within reach of everyone.  Everyone helps themselves to what they want with their chopsticks.  Guests, however, are usually offered more food than they can eat, all the best dishes.  Everything is fried in fatty oil and tastes delicious, although the meat is very fatty and bony, and is very different than carefully cut meats in America.  Anything you don't want gets dropped on the floor for the dogs to eat.  On the 31st, they killed a big black pig for the New Year.  They wrestled it to the table, tied it down, stuck a knife into it's neck, and let it bleed into a basin until it died.  Immediately, they shaved it, beheaded it, and began to cut it into pieces to be sorted and cooked.  I've never seen anything like it.  We were not allowed to do any work- the Lalo are hospitable to a fault.  So instead we sat on low stools before the charcoal brazier and ate seeds- sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and marijuana seeds (no, they don't get you high).  I got to try a lot of interesting pig parts, including liver, brain, and tongue.  I don't recommend them.  We visited the market, where were sold pig meats, bean curds, sugar cane, noodles, and so much more.  There was even an outdoor dentist who fitted the willing with dentures to replace their rotten teeth.  We also went walking to pick Chinese olives, which were so sour they tasted sweet after you'd swallowed.  The illusory sweetness was even greater when you dipped the olives in salt.  I almost couldn't stand the flavor, but when it was gone, my mouth tasted sweeter than honey.  Maggie and I taught several of our hosts how to play Crazy 8s and Egyptian Rat, which helped pass a lot of time.  For New Year's, we ate lit firecrackers and ate tangyuen- sticky rice balls swimming in brown sugar soup.

It was the most incredible experience, being in the village.  But knowing that we could come back and shower and change clothes was what got me through it.  We used the bathroom in an outhouse with a hole in the floor, washed our feet, faces, and occasionally hair, in basins in the courtyard, and didn't change clothes in the 6 days we were there.  In the mornings and at night the air was frigid, but during the day we burned in the sun.
It was a different experience than any I had before had, and one that I was glad to have had.  But I really enjoyed my shower after the walk (uphill at 5:30 in the morning) and two bus rides back.  We have a lot to be grateful for, we Americans.  We just don't even know how much.

I can't guarantee when next I'll be able to post.  I'm back and my aunt and uncle's house in Dali.  Next week, on the 15th, my cousins and I leave for their co-op in Kunming.  So far, I'm enjoying the food, the culture, and the people immensely.  I'd love to say more, but I don't know how long this will take to upload, so I'd better stop.  I have so much more I'd like to say and share, but it will have to wait for a faster internet or a face-to-face encounter.  Love you all!
~Monica