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
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