First journey

One of my enduring memories from childhood is of my grandfather reading from his (great-?) uncle's diary at the kitchen table of my uncle's homestead. As I write this I am reminded of his regular refrain after a lengthy gap in entries - "I once again fell into drunkenness and slovenliness". Though I haven't fallen into drunkenness, the slovenliness is definitely debatable :-). A little after my last missive, a Kunming-born friend from Paris was back home for summer holidays. Her husband just so happens to smoke and the inevitable happened... "Could I get one of those?". With the stress of studies and the unavoidable 7-10 days of broken concentration that comes with giving up, I've decided to put off giving up again until my impending 2-week "break", after 1:1 classes finish and before the regular semester starts.

I still have a lot of catching up to do with the blogposts but the rest will have to wait for my break.

Kunming

So my friend Yizhu arrives and invites me to come and stay with her family in Kunming. I was starting to get a little stir-crazy here in Yuxi and was very keen to head up to Kunming to see whether being something like 15 times bigger meant it was more "international" and more interesting. Spoiler - it is :-). I have started to be a little more comfortable getting around since my first Didi (Chinese Uber) trip to the train station to buy my ticket to Kunming. It really is very cheap - I have no idea how they cover petrol and wear on the car with what they are charging, let alone make any extra money whatsoever. They're certainly not being forced by anyone and there are definitely plenty of them... You get to see what they receive on their phones (Didi takes about 15%, similar to Uber I guess), and an 25-minute, 8km trip here in Yuxi is a little over 2€. Taxi's are (very) slightly more but are usually not nearly as nice or anywhere near as convenient.

I headed up to Kunming on the slow train on Friday (27th July), getting one of the cheap slow-train tickets (~2€) for the 90 minute, 90km journey.

Security at the train station

The awaiting masses

View from the train

The cheap carriages seem to be filled with families of modest means, and are packed. My seat was occupied by a 5-ish year-old girl and the conductor had to insist (I was just standing there looking lost and she took matters into control) to extract the kid's piles of food and clothing from my seat. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful but there were plenty of smiles from my neighbours.

Upon arriving I was greeted by drivers proposing their services. I had had a quick look at Didi before to get an idea of a reasonable price - 20RMB. I explained in broken Chinese where I wanted to go (about 4kms away) and was quoted 60RMB by a couple of them, including a moto-taxi - "euh, Didi says 20, I think I'll go with Didi...". It took quite a while to actually find my friend's house, as no one on the street knew which way the numbers went, including my friend :-). We found each other after 15 minutes or so and went off for a feast of various flavours of dumplings for lunch at a nearby restaurant.

After lunch we headed into town for my friend to meet a long-lost junior high school friend who was home visiting from Silicon Valley. He had just left a Criteo competitor and was heading to the Siri division at Apple... Strangely enough he *should* have been skiing in New Zealand's Southern Alps - he had everything organised (and everything apart from his plane ticket paid for by a friend) except an Australian transit visa. "But I'm not leaving the airport", he had pleaded at the airport. "Sorry", was the response... With other tickets apparently sold out for almost the following week, he gave up and returned home for a couple of weeks instead. Australians - apart from giving them the ability to catch "terrorists" who never intended to set foot on their soil, I've never heard any reason at all for requiring international transit visas...

We then walked around the centre for a couple of hours before heading to meet up with some more school friends and eat at the huoguo (Chinese hotpot) restaurant chain famed for "the best service in China".

Central Kunming

We had to wait for almost two hours to be seated but waited seated with games and complimentary drinks and nibbles. The waiting area wait staff were literally *running* around to fill empty popcorn bowls and get extra seats for new arrivals, etc. I was dubious about it being great service at first but those doubts quickly evaporated! When we were finally seated, the locals started ordering. Both of the "Frenchies" (my friend's husband and me) were keen for there to be plenty of fire in the hotpot seasoning but as one of the locals didn't do spicy, two of the four pots went without. How one could possibly grow up in Yunnan (or Sichuan) and not do spicy is beyond me - many people here eat very spicy noodle soup *for breakfast*!

(friend's photos to be added here later, my phone was dead...)

After a marathon session "on the hotpots" we went out for a walk around the main "Western-style" nightlife area of Kunming. I say "Western-style" because you could find areas like that in Wellington, New York or Paris. Nice looking bars (some with live music) and young people generally doing what young people do everywhere when out on a Thursday night. We ended up playing pool for an hour or so before being dropped of by one of the friends and hitting the hay.

On Friday we got up late and headed to one of Kunming's must-see spots - the Yunnan Nationalities Village. There are 26 different ethnic groups in Yunnan, many with different languages and even writing systems. From over 6000m down to sea level and about half the size of France (with about 75% of its population), Yunnan is one of the most culturally diverse places in the world. The park is sometimes a bit tacky (paying money to give bananas to elephants) but generally very well set up.

The main park entrance

One of the 30-odd traditional houses (I didn't note the nationalities...)

Because if they are going to put them up, I'm going to photograph them :-)

You can rent traditional costumes from various peoples and walk around, if the fancy takes you...

These boats have seen more sea-worthy days!

A proper tree house. Dad, why didn't we get one of these?!? :)

In-house barbeque. You can, of course, buy some (and we, of course, did :-))

A traditional church. Someone obviously believes it's important to reflect the daily realities and history of China's different nationalities.

Horns aren't practical for industrial farming (so are mostly gone in NZ cattle) but they are totally awesome!

Buddhist pagoda

And lunch. Why do we all take photos of food?

One of the totally AWESOME things about the houses/exhibits here - the meat you see hanging over the fire here (and everywhere else) is ACTUAL MEAT. Sure, I wouldn't want to have it served to me (the stuff they were selling was rather more sanitary) but it definitely adds to the authenticity when there is real meat drying over a real fire!

Because jumbo needs to eat bananas too, and for a buck you can give him one.

After 5 or so hours of wandering round and with a good third of the park still to see, we decided to call it a day and get back to Yizhu's parent's place, where the dad's side of the family was waiting for another feast. After 3 hours sampling various local delicacies, it was time to hit the town again and we headed out to meet up with another couple of friends. We were right in front of the band so had to shout a bit and after a little over an hour looked for another place. One of the friends was very keen to head to hear a visiting Cypriot DJ play at the Vervo bar, so we ended up there around 23H. The place was very much like you might find in London - indeed the owner tried to make it look like that as much as possible. The prices were also similar to London prices but I guess you get what you pay for! Alas, it appears that Kunming young people haven't fallen in love with Vervo yet and our group was pretty much the only group in there apart from the obligatory loud and overly friendly American English teacher and a couple of local strays.

Much easier to say in English :-)

I must confess I find it very hard to dance to average electronic music unless it's trance, and this was unfortunately very average techno. We danced until around 2h30 before finally heading home and just catching the end of the barbeque stand just on the corner by Yizhu's parent's place. Whether it be a kebab or even a hot Mince and Cheese pie, there is something about the taste of food at 3am that makes it soooo much nicer. Barbeque and Er Kuai (fried meat, veges and rice patties) takes this to a whole 'nother level though! Damn!

With a 4am bedtime, we didn't get up till pretty late, and I was pretty keen to have a walk around by myself and leave Yizhu and family to relax. The flat was pretty hectic with parents, Yizhu with husband and 3 year old, and 3 dogs. One of the dogs was a "barker" - from around 7am until 11pm there was regular barking... My idea was to walk to the closest metro station (about 5kms away) and then get the metro to Kunming South Railway Station to get the high-speed train back to Yuxi. The walk ended up being a little mundane but I must confess I did start thinking that I wasn't sure how long I was going to be able to stay in Yuxi with Kunming so close and not *that* much more expensive. I guess am most comfortable in big cities and Yuxi, a big city it is not. What will be expensive in Kunming is that there is actually stuff to do as opposed to pretty much nothing here in Yuxi. It is thus looking more and more likely I'll head there for the spring semester though really, who knows where I'll be next year! :-)

Silver (and white) Streak. The high-speed trains are definitely beautiful. I was late getting a ticket so ended up paying for 1st class (~7€50) and it was definitely a most different experience to the first leg. 

I'm not sure whether it is only here in Yunnan (following the infamous knife attack) but one thing is pretty clear, Yunnan missed the important points about trains - convenience and speed. You not only have a security (with metal detectors and luggage scanners) at the train stations, you have them to get into the metro! Whaaaaaat???? The high-speed rail station is a 40-45 minute metro ride (probably 1h taxi) from the centre so you have to be very far away indeed for the train to be quicker. As Yuxi to the centre of Kunming is around 1h in the car, and parking dirt cheap, there really is no point, unless you don't have a car. It was a wonderful weekend though, and I really appreciated the chance to get out of Yuxi and do some touristing. It was also awesome to speak French and forget about studies for a while. At least it was until I got back and had to catch up with my studies...

Language

So I will now admit the increasingly obvious - I have bitten off a little more than I can chew in terms of the pace of learning. I only have around 10 days left of 1:1 study before the break and though I'll probably achieve my goal of being allowed to join the Thai students' class, it has come at a pretty high cost. I am utterly exhausted. My eyes have been looking at screens (mainly my tablet with the spaced repetition software) and books so intensely I am finding it difficult to focus on a screen unless it's way too close. I know, I know, take it easy and you will be more productive with your learning, get out and get some exercise, stop smoking, socialise (it will be good for my spoken Chinese), etc. That is the problem when you adopt strategies for short, intense bursts of study - when it is pretty much working (I'm still reasonably confident I'll be OK to join the Thais) and changing strategies might not, you can get yourself into "trouble".

The problem is that I need to get through a certain number of chapters in the textbooks (which are rubbish, but I'll leave that for another post...), be comfortable with the grammar and most importantly, remember the vocab. While it has done no favours at all to my eyes, I'm pretty sure that the spaced repetition software on my tablet is the only practical way (mainly time-wise) for me to learn the vocab *and remember it*. It's not hugely productive because of the number of hours (and associated mental fatigue) using it but anything else would be even less effective... I am definitely, definitely, definitely going to take it a LOT easier next semester though and do all those things I know I should be doing! If it takes me two years to get my Chinese to an acceptable level then so be it... It definitely ain't worth working my rapidly declining body into the ground to save a few months learning Chinese!

In terms of language level, I am probably not too far from 1k characters, to greater or lesser levels of mastery. Unfortunately, it's still a long way from the 3k characters one needs to understand most common Chinese but it's enough to be able to get the gist from some things, and to even understand whole sentences on the odd occasion. Because I have been a terribly anti-social basement-dweller, my spoken Chinese hasn't progressed much at all. If people chose their words carefully (meaning they will regularly rephrase when they get a blank look) and speak slowly then I am capable of rudimentary conversation but the tones have proven to be much, much harder than I originally thought they would be. I still find it very hard to pick them out reliably from "real language" (exercises in class are pretty good) and find it very difficult to produce them properly in "real language". The issue is again processing speed - because my brain is yet to integrate the tones into the speech sounds (syllables) and still treats them as additional information, it means I need for things to be in slow motion or I just get lost. What I am finding by far the most difficult though are the tone *changes*. The tones of the *extremely* common equivalents of "not" (as in "not good") and "an" (as in "an apple") depend on the following word's tone, as does every occurrence of the 3rd tone. It is slowing down my speech to a point where it is positively painful getting anything out - I have to concentrate on that so much that the rest doesn't get the attention it needs (like remembering vocab and grammar!!!) and my speech is still totally horrible. There will no doubt be a point where it clicks but I've now accepted that that point is not going to be in the near future :(. It won't happen overnight but it will happen :-).

This reminded me of the plots of about 50 scifi series/movies - is this not the perfect motto for an massive corp with CEO-attempting-to-take-over-the-world? :-)

First runs

I didn't post last week for a few reasons, but mainly because I didn't have anything pressing to recount (and yes, I couldn't be bothered...). I don't have a ton to talk about this week either but I promised myself I'd post every week, and missing two would be, well, one too much :-).  I had also committed to stopping smoking, and that didn't actually happen until Thursday just gone, so there's that too. As I'm still suffering from nicotine withdrawal, this will be a short, whiny post...

So much as I love smoking, it is terrible for one's health and so has to be stopped, and stopped as regularly as possible. I have already expressed how I am finding keeping up the pace of study exhausting and in spite of the concentration boost nicotine gives, my energy levels just weren't there. I'm seriously hoping the extra oxygen to the brain will spice it up a bit - I also got some Omega 3 (fish oil) capsules and have been investigating nootropics. A friend (who I won't name) has been on a "brain pill" for a bit now and swears by it... I am very tempted. Even if it is 100% placebo - who cares! I genuinely don't mind paying (lots) for pills with chalk and sugar if in taking them I trick my brain into temporarily becoming more effective at memorising and processing speed. Anyway, I'm not there quite yet.

In the meantime, there is getting over the nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Every time I stop smoking again, and I count 2 months with zero nicotine as "stopping", I am reminded of a book by one of those "70s drug experimenting authors" who likened the withdrawal symptoms from stopping opiods and certain other highly addictive substances to the effects of certain hallucinogenics. Getting off 1 pack-a-day+ of cigarettes certainly does have some strange effects on the brain. And particularly deleterious effects on concentration and focus... I have a month's worth of nicotine patches to ease the most intense periods but alas, it's summer here, and has been approaching 30C. There isn't much Air Con here (at least in places I frequent, particularly my dorm flat) and any sort of sweating and the patches just fall off. That, you can imagine, is most annoying... The other remedy is eating junk food, so I made sure to stock up good and proper beforehand :-)

I have also started exercising, and have had a couple of runs on the hill behind the uni. My body is suitably painful in many, many places but that will all be a distant memory in a week or so. I think I'll be able to get a circuit of about 5-6 kms going, and as there are some pretty steep parts, I may even leave it at that for the foreseeable future. I generally tend to like doing 15 kms+ because that's when you really start to get the heart and lungs working but that is also very nasty on the joints, and I'm going to have to start being a little more careful about that, particularly running on concrete. Sniff, if only they had a rowing machine at the gym...

One of the things that has stuck me here is that the packaging is way overdone. When I say overdone, I mean that you get a packet of biscuits with thick outer plastic, a pretty solid plastic tray which is filled with more plastic vacuum packed individual (or in pairs) biscuits. While you can get something approaching that for some things in France, the plastic is never anywhere near as thick, and it's not that common. Here pretty much everything seems to be that way. A lot of bagged stuff also seems to have gas pumped into it to make the bags look bigger - I got some chippies (that's "crisps" or "chips" for those speakers of dialect ;) ) that literally have about 15g of dried potato for about 10g of plastic - and the bag looks about normal for a "single-serve" bag of chippies.

Another thing that I have been thinking about over the last couple of weeks is the Chinese relationship with "authority" - older, "wiser" colleagues and particularly teachers and scholars. China opened up long ago, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese go overseas to study or work each year. Some of them come back and have attained excellent language skills. So why does no one do anything about the monstrously bad translations on signage everywhere???

Sure, it can be funny but I really don't understand how it's not embarrassing. I would find it terribly embarrassing. Aren't they losing face by having such comical errors everywhere? And it's everywhere!

Where it's not so funny is when it's in a book for learning Chinese. I am using books from (probably) China's premier language teaching university (Beijing Language and Culture University) and there are errors everywhere. Many translations are bad, the Chinese character stroke orders are wrong in many places, and sometimes words have changed meanings to a point where it is very not Ok. Example? The word "xiao jie" (literally "little elder sister") is officially the word for "Miss", as in, "Excuse me Miss, could you tell me how to get to the train station?" Except that now it means "prostitute". I remember it didn't mean that 20 years ago when I was in Fuzhou, because I mistakenly used it to get the attention of a male waiter and my friend Li was very uncomfortable as the poor fellow reluctantly came over to see what we wanted. It does now though, and has for a decade or so. And the books are regularly reissued, because, like, they're supposed to be the best. Of course my teachers are well aware of the errors, as are many, many of the people at the Beijing Language and Culture University. What gives?

The only explanation I can come up with is that no one wants to tell the poor chaps who wrote the books (or signs...) because the venerable and wise people couldn't possibly be wrong. Or at least a young teacher/engineer/scientist could never tell the older teacher/engineer/scientist that it's wrong and needs changing. But what happens when the specs on a high-speed rail line aren't correct???

A friend told me that the ageism here in China's tech scene is even worse than it is in Silicon Valley (so at 30 you are already approaching the upper limit...) and I can see a logic in it. If everyone is 25 then there is no (serious) face lost by telling a colleague he has written bad code and needs to rewrite it. That couldn't happen to a "senior" (so, like a 40 year old!) developer, it would mean losing face. But as anyone who has worked on code that has to scale to hundreds or even thousands of servers (instances, containers, blah) knows - if the code is bad then you MUST tell the dev to fix it. Inefficient, broken code MUST NOT be allowed to get into prod, let alone stay there. So you only hire/keep coders who won't lose face when they are told their code is broken? I have no idea...

Some random picks to end with:

Every morning at first light a couple of squirrels jump from the roof onto the tree just in front of my balcony and hang out for an hour or so

Not just online, Viagra knock-offs in store in a pharmacy near you (well, near me anyway!) 

Chillies drying...

... In front of the (abandoned) Yuxi West train station

Oldies rockin' up the park

I never said I wouldn't post food porn...

The straw that broke my anti-taxi/Didi commitment. It wasn't supposed to rain at all, and rained very hard for something like an hour and a half. Of course I didn't take an umbrella... Now I know how, next time I'm taking a Didi (Chinese Uber)!!!

Last night's light(en)ing extravaganza

Tonight's sunset

 

First strides

I have been exploring the campus some more and am more and more glad I chose little ol' Yuxi for my language learning experience. There are quirky spots everywhere, an interesting and well-furnished (well-booked anyway :-) ) library, and a very nice patch of forest just behind the campus. The more I explore, the more I like it, and I'm not finished yet.

A proper map of the campus

With more water features

And places to get away from the crowds

Careful how you walk though! Steps of more than 75cms are not allowed!

Yes, those are croquet hoops

And that will do very nicely indeed for a little game of pétanque. Mais où sont mes boules ??? :)

We are in China after all...

Here is some more work from the students (that obviously didn't get taken away by a flood)

I started smoking again last October (I know mum, I know...) after finishing the "20kms de Paris" (and hitting the time I wanted!) with the intention of stopping after a month or so - "I deserve it", I said to myself. I did stop for a month back in January and started running again but had to stop running because of a lower back "thing". So, of course, I started smoking again... I am 99% certain the back issue is a posture thing. I can pretty much turn it on by lying/reclining slouched for a few hours and then get rid of it by not doing that for a couple of days. I do love slouching but I guess my aging body will no longer accept the abuse...

But next week the smoking will stop (is that the 15th time already???) and I will start running again. What finally decided me was exploring the patch of bush ("forest" in non-Kiwi speak) behind the uni - it's lovely and is just begging to be run! :-).

Very nice views of town from up here!

Our friendly sponsor's world headquarters. Apparently the Hongta Tobacco Corporation was once Asia's largest tobacco company, and it still dominates the town (i.e, has all the "good" jobs).

The Hongta grounds are for workers only... sniff, their gardens look stunning!

I also finally found the Buddhist temple I have been seeing off in the distance (and keen eyes might have spied on some of the photos), and should be running past it on a regular basis come next week.

There is also a creek (canal?) that I came across that has at least a few hundreds metres of dirt road beside it. At least according to the map it goes for quite a distance and if the dirt road beside it follows it, then I will have a much appreciated alternative to running on concrete. The dirt tracks in the bush are not "proper" tracks, so are not really any good for running on.

I also (finally!) found the campus gym. Unfortunately, like almost all gyms in Paris, it opens well after I ever feel like doing any sport - 09h (until 22h) :(. It is small but pretty well equipped, but is also missing the key piece for me - a rowing machine. Even though it's only about 125€ for the entire year, I decided to spend 30€ on a mat and some dumbbells instead so I can exercise before starting the day. They do have a proper setup for doing squats though (the King of all exercises :-) ), so I may end up joining later on...

And on the language learning and settling in...

One of the big issues I faced over the first 3-4 weeks was "culture shock". Maybe "shock" is a little strong, let's call it "culture inflammation". Though I may have spent quite a lot of time in various different countries and cultures, Yuxi is very different from where I have been living for the last 15-odd years in many, many ways. From simple practical things like all toilets being of the squat variety, to eating spicy food 1-2x a day, to walking down the street and only seeing Chinese faces! It doesn't matter that I am very happy to be here experiencing all these things (or maybe happily challenged for the toilets :-) ), it still adds extra cognitive load, and a dose of stress. As I had quite a bit of stress leading up to my departure from France (thinking about moving to China and all...), it has meant that I haven't really been able to relax for more than a day or so in many months (thanks John & whanau and Sanya & whanau for those precious moments of tranquility!). So I was sitting out on my balcony earlier this week and all of a sudden realised that I was feeling relaxed.

The reason I mention this is because I have been pretty disappointed with my memory since arriving. I seem to be forgetting things (mainly Chinese characters/words) and finding it a lot harder to keep stuff in there than I thought I would. And recall speed is simply atrocious if I do get there. Initially I was thinking that maybe all the studies are right, and the brain doesn't work as well at 40 as it does at 18... I'm going to blame it on the stress and extra cognitive load of arriving and diving straight into classes before acclimatising properly anyway :-).

So in terms of language, where am I at the end of my 4th week? To be frank, unless people seriously dumb down what they are saying and say it clearly and very slowly, I am still completely lost. Certainly less lost than 4 weeks ago, but I'm still not really able to have any semblance of a conversation yet. If people give me a minute or so after every sentence to process (with the context) what they were saying, then a minute or so to formulate a reply then I can get a few things across. But I only get that for a few hours each week with my teachers :-). One thing I think anyone who has learnt a language by diving in the deep end can attest to though, is that you will be listening to the radio or a conversation next to you, and you have mini-eureka moments when you realise - "I know what they are talking about!". I have been listening to a news radio station to have an hour or so of reasonably formal, clear language each day and had such a moment when I realised the radio jingle I have been hearing every 30 minutes or so meant "the world in your ear"!!!

In the beginning listening to real speech requires quite intense concentration but slowly and surely the incessant stream of incomprehensible sounds starts getting partitioned into chunks of first individual words + sounds, then individual phrases + words + sounds. Switch off a bit though and it turns right back into a sound stream. Struggling through this period is vital to pretty much all aspects of spoken language learning though - I am a firm believer in quantity when it comes to learning language, certainly over "quality", if "quality" means listening to educated people or reading "high" literature. That may help you pass language exams but that's definitely not what I'm interested in, or why I'm here.

So for the moment I am mainly slugging away at memorising and revising characters. My plan is to "go out into the world" only when I have at least a basic grasp on the language, so I can actually have a bit of a conversation. I have, of course, been attempting the basics, like "how much for the noodles?" but for the rest I have simply been trying to absorb as much as possible. I befriended a couple of graduating English teachers. Hanging out with one of them means the conversations are mainly (not exclusively) in English but when they are both there then it's mainly in Chinese. It's pretty intense to follow a conversation between two close friends (in any language!) but I can always but in and check whether I have understood something properly, and they are very helpful. They're both off to their new lives next week though!

Actually from next week (and particularly the week after), the university is going to turn into a ghost town. Pretty much everything is going to be closed, including the canteens if I understand correctly. Not that it is very likely I understood though - before meeting the budding English teachers I thought all the canteens closed at 17h30. Actually the entire 3rd floor is open until 21h, and the outside food stalls are open until 23h. And that's just the canteens, just outside the campus gates they are open later still... So I have started eating at a civilised hour again :).

And to finish with, though I haven't been to any strange and wonderful animal markets yet, I have been to Walmart. Yes, that's Walmart with a W, and yes, those are live turtles and live frogs ;).