Yunnan trip continued

The last day of our stay at Hong He University (literally "Red River Univ.") was spent doing a cultural exchange program with a group of Vietnamese girls. They met us at breakfast wearing Vietnamese "qipaos", a traditional silk, white, high collared dress. We spent the morning walking around parks with them and getting to know each other. Then we went to a restaurant for lunch that served Gou Chao Mian (crossing the bridge noodles). The noodles get their name from a well-known fable about a woman whose husband used to spend all day studying under a tree far from their home. Everyday she would cross a bridge on the way to where he was studying to bring him noodles. Since she lived so far from where he studied, she would add milk to the broth of the noodles to keep them warm. So now Guo Chao Mian noodles are always served in a broth with milk mixed in. Then they give you dishes of different vegetables, eggs, meats, and tofu so you can customize your noodles.

After leaving the Guo Chao Mian restaurant we dropped off our Vietnamese friends and headed to the town of HeKou (literally River Mouth) to start our first village home stay. This was by far the most memorable 3 days of the trip. After driving for hours through mountains and terraces we turned off a small road into a Miao village. The Miao minority is an ethnic minority group of China who have substantial populations in the Southern Yunnan province and Sichuan province. They have their own traditional beliefs and language which is completely different from the mandarin-speaking Han majority. When we stepped off the bus we saw the kids of the village come out and start staring at us. There were kids, chickens and dogs running around everywhere. A lot of the women were wearing traditional Miao clothing while the men wore mostly normal everyday clothes. Most of the homes in the village were old concrete army garrisons that had been converted into homes. The buildings sort of looked like motels. A lot of the homes were grouped around each other to form a 3 sided square with the fourth side as an entrance to courtyard area where they kept horses, pigs, and chickens.
We walked up a hill to a large patio where we put our stuff down, rested, and ate some freshly picked bananas. The kids followed us up the whole way and were obviously very interested in us. They were very shy we when first tried to play with them but after a little while they started to open up. One of the first things everyone noticed was a little girl around the age of 6 carrying a baby on her back that couldn't have been older than 1 years old. It seemed a little odd to us that a six year old was taking care of a baby without any real supervision. Some of the other parents explained that the girl takes care of here sister all day when she's home. During the week all of the kids go to school and live in dorms at the school since its so far from home. It wasn't really clear where these girls' parents were but it seemed like for some reason they were out of the picture so the six year old sister would take care of her sister all day when she was home and the other families would take care of her during the week.
The families prepared dinner for us which consisted of boiled chicken in a broth, a potato dish which resembled hash browns, some spicy tofu, and some kind of onion dish. For the rest of the trip while we were in any village or when we stopped at little restaurants on the way from one place to another we would eat this EXACT meal. Needless to say it got old after a while. The boiled pieces of chicken had huge bones in every piece which made it kind of a chore to eat and the head and feet of the chicken were always thrown into the broth too. It was a little unnerving to dip the ladle into the cloudy broth and pull out a chicken head staring you right in the face or a chicken foot with the nails still intact.

By the time dinner was done it was pretty dark outside. Our guide then began assigning us families to stay with. I roomed with this guy Ben Fox from Boston who I hadn't really spent much time with but really became good friends with after this experience. We carried our stuff to our family's TV room where there were two beds set up for us. Despite the fact that our family was very poor, eating mostly whatever they harvested or raised themselves and had very little in the way of luxury, they had a full entertainment system with speakers and satellite TV. Meanwhile our beds were covered with a bamboo screen and towels because our family didnt have extra sheets. When we walked into the room the son, who was 20 years old, was sitting watching TV with his grandfather. I didnt hear the grandfather say two words the entire night. He was very short with fairly dark skin and a stringy little chin beard. It was a very awkward introduction at first. For about ten minutes we were pretty much silent and pretended to be interested in the Chinese show they were watching that we couldn't understand at all. After a little while we started chatting with the son, our "younger brother", and asked basic questions about his age, family, etc. It was a little difficult to understand him at first because we were so unused to his accent but we got used to it. After five minutes his dad, mom, and uncle walked in and said hello. They seemed very excited to have guests. And of course the dad brought in his bamboo cigarette bong and started passing around cigarettes. I'm not a smoker but I wasn't going to risk offending our family so Ben and I both did a round on the bamboo bong. They all laughed as they watched us try it out. It was definitely a good way to break the ice. Afterwards we continued to talk about our trip, our school, what region of the US we were from, etc.

It was getting late and the family started heading off to bed. Before our younger brother left he brought in two large water basins to wash our feet in. People living in rural areas dont have very good showers or sinks and they work out in muddy terraces all day wearing sandals so they use water basins to wash themselves. They're huge on washing your feet before you go to bed. Our brother must have mentioned washing our feet at least three times that night. Also, he pointed out where the bathroom was. Later that night before I went to sleep I walked down a steep dark path with trash all over the place to a concrete outhouse. As I approached the bathroom and shone my flashlight through doorway a rat ran across the floor. "Perfect," I thought. Right when I stepped through the doorway I was startled by a Kylie Minogue ringtone that wasn't mine and I discovered a much older Miao man in one of the stalls. Did I mention there were no stall doors? ... It was a memorable first experience of the village outhouse.

By 4AM the next morning our younger brother was up and getting his day started. His mother came into our room with him to grab some stuff out of the refrigerator to start making breakfast. I couldn't believe how early it was. Around this time the roosters started crowing incessantly and all I could do was attempt to ignore all the animal noises and try to get a few more hours of sleep. I woke up about every 10 minutes from either roosters crowing, pigs squealing, or dogs barking at each other. When I stepped out of our room my village family mother saw me and brought me a basin to wash my face in and offered me breakfast. The whole group had breakfast together up at the main village patio. It consisted of spicy noodles in broth with a fried egg and some rice pudding. This EXACT meal would also be repeated every morning for the rest of our trip until we got back to Kunming. It wasn't exactly our idea of a breakfast of champions.

That morning we left the village to go on rafting trip in the NanXi river. We were told it was going to be a 45 minute trip but it ended up being 5 hours. I didn't realize it at first but as went farther down the river we all started to notice how disgusting the water was. A lot of villages and homes were set up right on the banks of the river and there were piles and piles of trash on the river banks because people in the villages would just throw their trash behind their house. When I looked at the water I could see tiny bits of trash floating around in it as well. It was definitely a way to experience firsthand the lack of waste management and pollution awareness in rural China. The highlight of the rafting trip was that at one point, the river became the dividing line between China and Vietnam. It was pretty cool to see Chinese people on one side wearing certain types of clothes and Vietnamese people on the other side wearing distinctly Vietnamese clothes.

The rafting trip was also a great opportunity to test my theory that a smiling and waving go a long way when you're surrounded by people who are very different from you. Throughout the trip we were being stared at by rural Chinese people whose expressions were kind of nervous and cold. I thought instead of always doing the awkward stare back at them I'd try to lighten the mood by smiling and waving. Usually as soon as I would do it they'd start waving back and laughing. I got some great responses from the people standing on the banks of the river.

When we finally got done with our rafting trip, our guides and teachers, who were just as suprised by the 5 hour trip as we were, made the executive decision to find a hotel where we could take showers. After 5 hours in a trashy river, we were all very grateful for this decision. After we were clean, we went into town and had dinner. Afterwards our teachers told us that the next night we had to make an American-style meal for our host families. This sounds like a great idea in theory but trying to find American food or even ingredients for an American meal in HeKou where we were definitely the only Americans is a nearly impossible task. Ben and I joined up with our friends Joe and Josh and decided that we wanted to make handburgers and french fries. The only thing we found were buns at a bakery. We were told that the only place to find meat and produce was at the morning fresh-meat market which had already closed. Luckily, our teachers agreed to take us back the next morning.

When we finally got back to the village that night, our younger brother brought in fresh pineapples for us. Delicious.

The next morning we went out to an elementary school for rural children located near the top of a mountain. When we got there the school was literally in a cloud which was pretty cool. We caught the kids finishing up lunch. We spent the next hour playing games in the school courtyard with them. It was a lot of fun teaching them American games and watching them get really into them. After a while I did start to notice that some of the kids were wearing really worn out clothing or clothes that were way too big for them. Most of the kids start working at home before they finish high school and college is far too expensive for them to attend. There is also a lot of pressure to come back and help out at home. It was depressing to think of the limited opportunities these kids have but what was important on that day was that they were getting exposed to different people and having fun. After playing outside with them our group got split into smaller groups that went to the classrooms to teach the kids some english words and phrases. Before we left the school, all the kids lined up outside and sang us a song.

From there we went to the fresh meat market in search of ingredients for the American-style meal we were planning on serving our Miao family. I think we didn't read into the "Fresh" part of the fresh meat market. When we got there there were live chickens in cages all over the place and whole sides of beef hanging on hooks. Not exactly frozen meat paddies. I don't know how this happened but our teacher managed to find a guy with frozen chicken breasts. It was the only bag of frozen, already-killed, already-cut meat in the market so we bought all we could. We decided to adjust the plan and go with fried chicken sandwiches and french fries. The market had produce that had been picked the day before and it was the cheapest shopping experience I've had in China. We bought pounds of potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, seasons, and flour for a couple bucks.

The village was long way from the fresh meat market so by the time we got back, we had to start cooking right away. The kitchen stove consisted of two enormous woks that sat on top of a wood-fed oven. They made perfect friers. Our younger brother brought in a pile of wood and a lighter. He was about to leave but after watching us struggle to get the fire started with a lighter, he laughed and came over to help us get it started. He went over to a corner of the kitchen and uncovered a pile of chunks of dried pig fat. He lit a chunk of it with his lighter and threw it into the oven and within minutes the oven was roaring.

The entire time we were cooking, members of both families kept peeking into the kitchen with looks of total confusion and amusement on their face. They had no idea what what we were making. At one point, the father of one of the families came in and asked us what we were making. When we told him chicken, he ran outside, grabbed a live chicken, hurried back in and held it upside-down over the wok ready to pull the chicken's head off. We all panicked and kept trying to reassure him that we didn't need it and that we already had chicken, but he kept insisting that we use the chicken. Finally, after pointing to the bowl of defrosting chicken breasts several times and telling him there was no need, he gave up and walked out of the kitchen with his chicken. He was completely confused.

I think the mother and father of the family, who had been watching us cook for a while spread the word to the other family about how weird the American meal was going to be, because after we had finished cooking, both families had already made back-up dinners. We set everything out in a family common room and told everyone to come and eat. We had to put all the sandwiches in a large serving bowl because the villagers eat everything out of bowls. The family members arrived one by one and brought in some of their own dishes as well. Our younger brother sat down first and tried to grab a chicken sandwich out of the bowl with his chopsticks. We all laughed and taught him how to eat a sandwich. Every member of the family that came in after him tried using chopsticks on the sandwiches as well so everyone got a good laugh at each other. The meal was a total success and many went back for seconds on sandwiches and fries. Our younger brother in particular really liked the ketchup and when we ran out of American food, started dipping the Miao food in it. The Miao families made a spicy mushroom dish and some boiled chicken in broth (of course). The delicacy of the night was a huge bowl of chicken blood with pieces of chicken liver floating around. I guess the chicken that the father wanted us to use went to good use after all. At the encouragement of both families, I had a bite of the chicken liver. It tasted exactly how you would imagine chicken liver in chicken blood would taste like.

The dinner was a great opportunity to get to know the family better. We shared some beers with the family, they shared some of their baijiu and passed around the cigarette bamboo pipe, and and told us about how the village worked and a little bit about the Miao ethnic group. The fathers of the two families that we had dinner with were two of five brothers whose families all lived in the village. These five families were the central families of the village. By the end of the dinner, all of the brothers stopped by to say hello. They taught us a few words in the Miao language, and we in turn taught them a few words in english. We also told them a little bit about American college life.

After dinner we all went up to meet all the other families at the main village patio area to watch a good ole fashion cock fight. Everyone got really into it but it was all in fun and none of the chickens got hurt. Some of the villagers also played some instruments that looked like a cross between an accoridion and a large flute. It was a great night and I feel like we all got to bond with our families.

The next morning we left the Miao village in Hekou and set out to the next village in Bamei. I will cover Bamei in the next post.

Ten Days in the Yunnan Province Part 1... a much needed update

So I've been meaning to write this post for a while. I went on my Yunnan trip for 10 days and came back to a week of projects, tests, and a new roommate. I also have taken a few field trips for classes this past week that were pretty interesting. I'll try my best not to leave anything about my Yunnan trip out and I apologize if this goes off on tangents but it's all in the effort to give you a better understanding of some aspect of China that you may be unfamiliar with. Here it goes...

We took a very early flight from Beijing to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. Yunnan is in southwest China and borders Tibet, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. My group's trip stayed more in the southern region of Yunnan closer to Vietnam so it was warm weather from the moment we landed in Kunming.

Kunming is a rapidly growing international city. The government is really trying to speed up development because of its advantageous location in Southeast Asia. We only got to have lunch in Kunming before we headed out to the more rural areas, but you could quickly tell how new and vibrant the city looked compared to Beijing.

The first city we stayed in was called JianShui but before we got there we stopped off at a cigarette factory to take a tour. It was definitely a random stop for us and it was by far the least interesting thing we did, but mentioning it gives me a chance to talk about smoking in China...

Smoking is HUGE in China and has become an integral part of the culture. A common proper way for men to meet and introduce themselves to each other is to offer each other a cigarette and to older people it is seen as impolite not to accept it. On the last day of our trip we stayed at a hotel in Kunming where a wedding was going to take place that night and so there were hospitality tables set up around the lobby. Every one of them were stacked high with cigarettes. Tobacco is also a major industry especially in the Yunnan province and brings a ton of tax revenue, which is the main reason why the government has done very little to curb smoking. In Yunnan a lot of people smoke cigarettes out of these huge bamboo water pipes because they say it keeps your teeth from turning yellow. Everywhere we went men were carrying this huge bamboo water pipes around with them. Compared to men, women smoke very little because its traditionally looked down upon for women to smoke.

So back to the factory...We didnt stay very long but while we were there we got to see the company golf course that had a massive shiny metal pipe in one of the putting greens and we watched a movie about the history and successes of the company (i.e. 30 minutes of standard Chinese propaganda).

JianShui is a very ancient city in Yunnan. The streets are all paved with stones and the architecture is very traditional. The first night we spent walking around the city and enjoying our first night of visible stars, fresh air, and perfect weather. As we walked around we definitely got the feeling that we were in ancient China. That night I also ran into a huge group of Israeli tourists whom I chatted with for a little bit.

The next day our guides took us around the city. We first went to the Zhu mansion from the Qing Dynasty where we got to learn a little bit about traditional architecture (huge emphasis on courtyards) and snap some pictures.

From there we walked through the morning meat market on our way to a tofu factory. I have to say I've never been stared at more by Chinese people than when all 20 of us Americans walked through the market with luggage in hand. There were chickens running around and unrefrigerated meat hanging everywhere along with fish swimming around in buckets. After getting out of the meat market we started walking through some very close stone alleyways around some very old homes before getting to a well. The well is where the neighborhood still gets their drinking water from. As an older woman and several older men filled up jugs of water to be sold around the neighborhood, we noticed that there were huge fish swimming around in the water. The woman told us that they put fish in the well to know if the water is sanitary (confused? so were we). It's very easy: if the fish die, they don't drink the water. Today the fish were alive but I can assure you we didn't drink the water.

The tofu factory was right around the corner and actually wasn't much of a "factory". It was really just a few dimly lit rooms with women sitting around completely focused on the buckets of tofu in front of them as they formed tofu squares at a lightning fast pace. Another women explained to us how they make tofu and gave us cups of a hot tofu milk (basically hot milky liquified tofu). Just outside the "factory" we saw some men dropping of heaps of soy beans and other men keeping an oven fire going to help cook the raw tofu. We looked down next to the old wood burning oven and saw a huge rusty metal box filled with raw tofu. I took a picture of the box and didn't ask to try any more tofu.

After the tofu factory we drove to a famous pottery workshop that seemed to be randomly placed in another very old, poor neighborhood. It was pretty cool to watch the artists at work. I got some great pictures and bought a cup from the shop.

On our way to our next town, Yuan Yong, we made a few stops. First we went to a cave situated in a historic nature reserve. The reserve had several Daoist and Buddhist statues and gates. When we got to the cave our guides explained that a certain bird builds its nests in the ceiling crevices of the cave. Since these nests are edible and considered a delicacy, people climb up to the ceilings of the caves a couple times a year to collect old nests. When we entered the cave we watched a few daoist guys climbing all around the cave walls and hanging on to the ceiling looking for nests without any shoes, harnesses, or ropes of any kind. It was impressive to say the least. We took a boat far into the cave and then spent the rest of the time walking through and looking at the different natural formations.

Yuan Yong was a couple hour drive from JianShui and in a much more rural area (each town/village on the trip seemed to get more and more remote). The drive to Yuan Yong along with every other bus ride we had was an experience in itself. If you weren't sleeping or reading it was easy to become glued to the windows of the bus, mouths agape staring at the unbelievable landscapes of Yunnan. I'd never seen anything like that anywhere; Huge mountains that barely touched the clouds, green valleys, and endless steppes where farmers were planting, harvesting, and driving yak-led plows. Our last stop before getting to Yuan Yong was this really famous overlook of these steppes. We got to the site right during sunset, which made it the perfect time to take pictures. The way the sun hits the steppes (which are filled with water) makes it look like the skin of a tiger. I'll post the picture I took there.

It was pretty late when we got to Yuan Yong so we checked in, walked around the town a little bit, and went to sleep.

The next morning most of the people went to another overlook at 5AM to watch the sunrise but my roommate and I decided to catch up on much needed sleep and didn't go. It ended up being a great decision because on the way back from the overlook, the bus hit a traffic jam and my roommate, 2 other people, and myself spent the day really getting to know the town. First we checked out this middle school behind our hotel. We looked over this gate and saw that the entire school was lined up outside according to grade. All of a sudden music started playing and all the kids started doing a synchronized dance. I guess they start out each day with a little dancing. I took a great video of it on my camera that I'll post ASAP. We decided to get off the beaten path and started heading down this dirt road to get a closer look at all the steppe terrace farms. On our way down we had some close encounters with some yaks and caught the attention of some local kids playing in the steppes. They saw us in the distance and told us to come down. We climbed down the steppes to where the kids were and chatted for a little bit before heading back to the hotel.

The next stop was Hong He University, the best university in the Yunnan province, where we did some cultural exchange activities with some of the students. We got paired with a student and walked all over the campus which was unbelievable. The campus had tons of brand new buildings, a lake on one side of campus surrounded by some academic buildings, a huge greenhouse, and tons of new athletic facilities. It was such a huge break from the rural towns we had been in before but there were still things that reminded us that we were definitely in a rural area. The two sides of campus are split up by one main road. On the road right through the middle of this modern campus you still see people driving rickety flat bed trucks with baskets of produce and men riding yak-driven wagons.

The student who gave me a tour of campus is an english major so she spoke perfect english but refused to use it with me because she wanted me to practice chinese. I then realized that I was at a really frustrating point in my Chinese ability. I start off the conversation easily and usually get told that my Chinese sounds good. As the conversation goes on though somewhere along the line I fall out of rhythm, forget basic words and crash. So while I sounded great at the beginning and did some coherent, fluid chatting with this girl, after about 15 minutes my chinese just fell apart. I spent the rest of the conversation sputtering along trying to make sense. It was kind of embarrassing but the girl I was with was pretty patient and helped me along. It was really frustrating at the time but definitely made me want to practice more and do a better job memorizing things I learn in class. I've made a lot of progress since then.

Something I forgot to mention earlier is that Yunnan is an extremely diverse province with lots of ethnic minorities. I'll get to most of my encounters and experiences with some ethnic minorities later but it was really interesting to talk to the student from Hong He about how she goes to school with a lot of people from small ethnic groups that have very different cultures. Hong He actually has several different cafeterias to deal with the dietary restrictions of some of these groups (for example, one ethnic group doesn't eat pork). It was really cool to see how the school caters to the various ethnic groups.

After touring around campus and trying to have a conversation with my partner, we met up at the university hotel and had dinner with everyone together. That night we walked around campus and hung out at an outdoor chuanr place.

So that brings me to the start of my first village homestay with a family from the Miao ethnic group. Its getting late here so I'm going to save the rest of the trip for tomorrow. I can only load a few pictures on my blog each time so I think I'm going to start an online photo gallery where I'll put all of my Yunnan and Beijing pictures.

I'm sorry it took me so long to give an update. Things were busy here last week. Also, I really appreciate the feedback I've been getting about the blog so if you have any questions or thoughts please email me/facebook post/skype me. I will definitely finish the Yunnan rundown tomorrow.