First strokes

This post talks about some "art-related" stuff and accompanying thoughts and experiences.

Yuxi is still relatively small and undeveloped. That is changing fast, as the nearby farmers (peasants?) migrate to cities like they have already in many parts of China, and did in the west until 3/4 of a century ago. That means the cityscape is changing fast. A lot of it is not overly visually appealing, though I will point out that some of the ugliest architecture I have ever seen, if not *the* ugliest, can be found in the "cités" of Paris. Something particularly nasty should have been done to the architects in the 60s and 70s, and those that designed much of Paris deserved medieval style punishment! And Paris is still considered by many to be the most beautiful city in the world. So things will no doubt change.

"Just say no"

Much better - A quirky city-centre micro-park

China has always had amazing parks and the local government here certainly wants Yuxi to have some fine ones. I've posted some photos of them already. One of the main central parks is currently undergoing a major design and seems to be completely closed off at the moment. I did explore the park just behind the uni a little more though, and came across some interesting statues.

The Red Spaceship from the other side of the park

A map of the park

There are dozens of these statues of famous politicians, writers, painters, etc. from around the world.

And many stylised sculpture/statues of various different world cultures

And now a word from our sponsor...

I must also confess that the uni does have a little museum just behind the Foreign Languages School that I haven't been inside yet. I'm sure it will merit a post of its own, so that is going to be my excuse for not going in yet :-). Outside, however, there are some very cool sculptures of fish.

On the wall of the museum

There are also a couple of drain covers that have been requisitioned for various nefarious expressive purposes around the large pond a stone's throw from my dorm building.

And that brings me to one of the main topics of today's post...

Different cultures and sub-cultures have different relationships with possessions. I was recently reminded of this regarding China when I was told about a new drone delivery service that is up and running in some places here. I was chatting with a guy over lunch in Bordeaux before leaving who had recently been here to see Huawei about servers and see whether there was any new tech ideas he could steal and bring back to the "old world" (sorry, couldn't resist...). The drones somehow deliver to distribution boxes (maybe helped by a human?) and then people bowl on up, open the distribution box and take their package. Apparently, the distribution boxes aren't very "secure" - basically, if you have a package then you can open any of the boxes and take whatever you want. "How do you stop people from stealing other boxes?", the guy asked the local showing him the setup. "Only a European would ask that question", was his reply. (Sure, there are cameras, but nothing a little disguise wouldn't fool).

Anyway, around two weeks ago now, a class of art students set up around the nearby pond to paint it. When I first arrived it had struck me that this would be a great place to paint impressionist paintings of a pond with lilies and fish. I don't know whether they made it specifically for this purpose but one of the art teachers certainly had the same idea :-).

Students hard at work

On my way back from dinner that day (Ok, so it is really a late, second lunch - how can you eat the evening meal at 17h00 for God's sake?!?!?!?), I noticed that everyone had just left their stuff there "mid-paysage" and had gone off. I said to myself - this wouldn't happen in Europe. Or New Zealand. Or America. As interesting as that might be, that is not what I found particularly noteworthy. Because when I passed by the next morning, the easels were all still set up with half-finished paintings from the night before, paint palates out to the ready with the colours they were using, stools and paint boxes waiting patiently for their budding artists.

Away fishing

As they were that evening. And the following day, and the following day... Now I have briefly talked about the weather here and it has become a little more seasonal since I last talked about it. Some fine spells interspersed with rain - torrential rain. Sure, I guess they were all using oil paint but... really? The canvases were at least on wooden frames, and some of the downpours have been pretty impressive - like water coming through my new umbrella it was hosing down so hard! The students simply set up when their "outdoor painting" unit starts, and pack up when it finishes - everything stays where it is for the entire intervening period, rain or shine!

And the heavens opened... (notice the surface of the pond, it rained even more heavily at other times)

I have noticed various other things being left around the place - wet umbrellas outside classrooms and the canteen, clothes on communal clothes lines or hedges, and for some inexplicable reason, many students' books and notebooks lining the top of a low hedge in front of one of the dorms. I'm pretty sure a good portion of those also caught a downpour...

Anyway, on to other matters "art". Last week I was invited to see the Foreign Language School "Graduation Performance" in one of the campus theatres by a visiting Thai language teacher. We are neighbours so left together and obviously had to arrive on time, as she was one of the guests of honour. As luck would have it, the monumental downpour I talked about above started about 2 minutes before we had to leave. Even though there was no wind and we all had large umbrellas, when the road you are walking on turns into a river and every obstacle provides a handy surface for the rain to ricochet off, you get wet! It was warm so I actually thought it was quite fun, though I suspect I was the only one of our group who did :-).

So what was this "It's Lucky To Know You Graduation Performance"? I was in several language plays in my days back at Vic(toria University) so thought it might be something like this. I had enquired what kind of performance would be put on and was simply told "many things". All 15 or so of the different graduating classes of the Foreign Language School had a number they put on (though obviously not everyone performed, or wanted to...). And it was indeed "many things" - a variety show. Short comedy skits, to singing, to choreographed pop song dancing (think Britney...), to traditional Khmer dancing, to Burmese flutes. Oh, and some freestyle rapping (in Chinese) too! All very competently MC'ed by 5 exquisitely dressed graduating students. So a little bit like back at Vic but not really :-). Apparently there are several such performances throughout the year, and I am very keen to get involved in some way. It will likely be in a stage-managing role, though who knows. The Kiwi English language teacher here, Dan, also has some thespianic tendencies and I did write (and direct) a play for my students back when I was teaching in Fuzhou 20 years ago...

The MCs

Performances

The adoring crowd

The night's performers

As a final comment about arty stuff, I'll briefly mention my utter ineptitude at it, or at least of the "drawing" variety. I am learning Chinese, and am focusing quite heavily at the start on characters. The "Digital" is now a very important of my existence and I very much want to immerse myself in China's exploding digital world. Unfortunately (or probably fortunately!!!), everything is in Chinese, so I really don't understand anything yet and that world is still completely closed to me. And will be until I have a couple of thousand characters, so I'm hitting the books hard. One of the interesting things about writing is that many studies (sorry, no refs...) have shown that writing is a very important part of learning to read well, particularly if you want to do it quickly. Writing on a keyboard just ain't the same - you need a pen(cil) and paper. I have been writing lots of characters both in and out of class, and my characters are UGLY! Like not just "not beautiful" but often bordering on incomprehensible to my teachers. And you also get very similar characters, where the length of a particular line will mean it means one thing or another. Or at least other people do, mine could be either! Another gotcha for me is that a huge number of characters have a left part and a right part that are characters in their own right - so if you do the left part and right part too large with too big a space between them, it looks like you have written two characters not one. They have simplified many of the characters significantly but I still find myself either writing huge characters, or turning many of the more detailed characters into a kind of visual porridge. I have tracing exercises in my books but they aren't helping much. Apparently many of the students my teachers get don't want to bother with characters so they are generally very positive that I am focusing on them and want to learn them well. One of my teachers even keeps trying to tell me that it she doesn't think it's important that foreigners get the stroke order right (because you have to write every stroke in a particular order...), to which I reply "I want to write them like a Chinese person writes them". Or at least in the right order :-).

My homework - two friends go to the bank to change some money.

First mouthfuls

Today will mainly be a quick post about food, though if you are expecting a guide to the wonders of Yunnan cuisine, you'll be sorely disappointed! I am yet to venture out to any of the hundreds of restaurants in Yuxi, and apart from knowing that the cuisine here has lot's in common with Sichuan, I don't know much more than that. One of the reasons I haven't been tempted to explore the restaurants yet is because the university canteens are so totally amazing. Back at Vic and Lincoln universities in New Zealand, the university cafés were "for profit" outfits, either run by businesses or the Student Unions. So they were basically like any café/caféteria you would find in town, and were priced accordingly. I never (really) experienced the caféterias in a French university, apart from getting the odd hotdog at the Bordeaux CROUS once or twice. I seem to remember it being a bit cheaper than what you would get at a "normal hotdog stand" but not amazingly so. My understanding is it is always pretty basic fare, and for filling the stomach rather than engaging the palate.

So how does it work here? First of all, one needs to understand that a good proportion of the students studying here are also living on campus in dormitories. I would guesstimate somewhere between 50% and 70%. The "foreign students" dormitories/flats have a kitchen but I'm pretty sure the normal dorms don't, at least not individual ones. So many students at the university eat in the caféterias at least once a day, and plenty twice a day. So probably upwards of 6 THOUSAND meals a day :-). There is one main building and a couple of other spaces near to it.

The main building has 3 floors. The first two have reasonably similar food, and the 3rd has the "special" (and slightly more expensive?) stuff. Floors 1 & 2 are the "rice" floors. Basically, you rock on up to the first window and get yourself a big bowl (either plastic for eat-in or cardboard for take-away) with either one or two (or 5 if you are a body-builder :-)) servings of rice. There are usually two kinds of rice on offer, served from adjacent windows. The "good" rice is 0.6 RMB (0.08€) for one serving and 1.1 RMB for two, the "cheap" rice 0.5 RMB for one and 0.9 RMB for two. I must confess in the beginning I didn't realise there was a difference between the two and was a little confused as to why the price was changing... :-). From there you have about 15-20m of window space, with different dishes lining the windows, two dishes deep. That's about 4 dishes per metre, so upwards of 60 different dishes to choose from. Per floor! Some of the dishes are pretty similar (e.g., spicy or plain bok choy) but you can get everything from noodles (if you want noodles with your rice!) to tofu (I think I've eaten 7 differents kinds, and haven't had them all), saveloys to crispy duck to chicken feet :-), spicy sliced carrot to mushrooms to seaweed. And that's just floors 1 & 2 of the main building.

Note that the photos aren't representative of the crowds, I tend to go when there are fewer people...

The first floor

I'll confess that as they put stuff out on platters, and not everything gets eaten right away, sometimes the food isn't particularly hot. The deliciousness of almost all the dishes means that it's not a big deal though! I have also been spending most of my time on floors 1 & 2 because all you have to do is point and hand over your bowl, and they will heap a serving into it - no complicated language needed :).

The 3rd floor has stuff that is mainly done to order, and is set up in terms of windows - the noodle soup window, Sichuan hotpot window, etc. so you go up and tell the person at the counter what you want and they will cook it for you. You will have to wait 3-10 minutes, depending on what you get. I haven't spent much time there because it requires explaining what you want eat - there will be plenty of time for that as the year goes on - and I am still very far from having settled on what my favourite dishes are on even the first floor!

The 3rd floor

Freshly squeezed juice and smoothies

The Muslim canteen. I also hear the call to prayer off in the distance from the dorm, particularly in the morning.

The outside eating area and food windows

I must confess that the change in diet, environment and daily rhythms has caught up with me a little though, and my intestinal microbiome has started the expected adjustment period. Going from eating yoghurt twice a day and cheese most days to eating none, and eating spicy food usually twice a day, appears to be taking its toll. Nothing at all worrying but a trifle inconvenient nonetheless! The deliciousness of the food makes up for any of the associated troubles, and I have already stocked up on yoghurt :-).

On a related food note, I spent yesterday evening hanging out with the "other Kiwi dude", Dan, and his wife at their new flat. He sent me his address (not far from the Walmart) and I set off late afternoon to spend an evening getting the low down on Yuxi and catching up on all affairs Kiwi. The new 26-storey block of flats he is living in was built on the site of an old timber warehouse, encircled by other (much smaller) blocks of flats and various shops and offices. When I say encircled, I mean that I went round the entire complex twice looking for the entrance, and only found it the second time. The inside building towers over the surrounds so this was quite frustrating! I ended up asking a couple of people - the first guy understood what I wanted and pointed me in the right direction but the woman and child a few metres before the entrance simply didn't understand what I was asking... After finally finding the entrance (just a driveway and small covered walkway), I then went round the entire building looking for the entrance to the building proper... I ended up contacting Dan on WeChat and he came down to meet me at the lift on the ground floor. We headed up to his flat, I was introduced to his wife and he quickly followed with - "Ya wanna pie, mate?". "A pie?", I enquired. "Yeah, a pie. Mince and Cheese or Steak and Cheese. An Irvine's pie". It took me a while to understand what he was offering me and I answered with a hesitant "Yes?". Dan loves pies, so when they go back to NZ they swing past the supermarket on the way to the airport, stock up, and then put them in the freezer as soon as they arrive back in Yuxi. LOL, no really, LOL :-).

After enjoyably shooting the breeze and watching delayed coverage of my birth nation give my adopted nation yet another demoralising lesson with the oval-shaped ball, I left shortly before 22h30 to walk back to the dorm. Dan was a bit surprised I was going to walk - not that it's dangerous, just that why would you want to. I like walking, and I *really* like walking in cities at night. I would often walk back to my flat in Paris when out with friends on the Rive Droite, even at 02h00, even if it took me an hour. Cities are different at night, and can have a very different vibe.

One of the mildly annoying things about the uni complex here is that the gates are locked up at 22h30, and you have to get a guard to open it for you if you arrive after that time. In addition to that, the guards aren't at the gate close to my dorm, so I'd have to spend an extra 15 minutes and possibly have a long and annoying gesticulation session with the guard to assure him that it's not a big deal to come back from town at 23h... Or, I could just take a 10 minute detour and come in to the uni through the park at the back, where they are yet to erect a fence. For some reason I preferred the idea of trying to explain things to a potential police presence in the park than a uni security guard. Neither were necessary - the park is poorly lit at night but apart from a young couple walking arm-in-arm, I didn't encounter a soul and was back home quickly. So the closing of the gates presents only a very mild inconvenience, at least until the build a fence! :-).

First steps

I opened my last post with an image of a lovely bag of Yunnan Arabica coffee. I learnt a valuable lesson yesterday - don't make assumptions if you can't read the label.

What is the difference between these two bags of coffee?

The one on the left, that I bought earlier this afternoon, has pretty damn good ground coffee beans. The one on the right, that I bought two of yesterday, has a mix of instant coffee, milk powder and sugar. You can imagine my disgust when I got up this morning for my morning brew! It was clearly marked on the pink/red labels what was in there, if, of course, you can read Chinese. Alas, a week has not been enough to get me to that point yet :-).

With Monday's classes not till the afternoon, I decided to have another go at opening a bank account on Monday morning. I walked the half-hour or so back to the main branch of the Bank of China and managed to get myself in front of a teller who spoke reasonable English. I was a bit uncomfortable about the fact that the teller was actually serving an elderly woman at the time, who just had to wait while they spent about 20 minutes trying to establish whether or not I could open a bank account. I was eventually told to go and sit down while they sorted things out. About 20 minutes later I was called back up and was asked for my phone number - they would have to get back to me as they had no idea how to open a bank account for a foreigner... And it wouldn't be today. I briefly thought about trying at the China Construction Bank just across the road but then had a thought - maybe the branch closest to the uni would have done it before? So I headed there, now with pretty low expectations of a positive outcome, to give it one last try for the day. This branch was empty and when they had established who had the best English of the available tellers, I was sat down and started handing over documents and explaining what I wanted to do. There was again much discussion and pouring over my passport and uni acceptance letter and I was sure that they would tell me that I wasn't going to be able to open a bank account until I had been given my residence permit, which is not going to happen for at least another couple of weeks. But the scrutinising continued and I was eventually handed a Tax Residency declaration form. Progress! I hadn't been given a form before! I didn't have all the details so suggested I go back to uni and collect them and return with the form filled in, which I promptly did. As I couldn't get the "proper" address of the flat/dormitory from the Admin office, I fell back to good ol' trusty Google maps... I thought would give it a go anyway :-). After returning and then sitting for another hour or so I left the bank again, this time proudly in possession of my Great Wall debit card. Success!

The weather from last Sunday until today mid-afternoon has been absolute rubbish. There might have been half an hour of sun but with all the grey and rain that just meant it got hot as well as being very humid. I was expecting thunderstorms and downpours, which we've had, but also quite a bit of sun in between. Not so! It has been actually pretty cold during the night and I have definitely been needing the duvet. I did get a decent walk around the campus and direct surrounds on Tuesday after dinner though, and I finally found the Red Spaceship that I can see from my kitchen window! Turns out the campus is right next to a pretty big park, where the red protrusion resides. There is some quite dense bush around, and some tracks into it, so when the ground gets a little less wet I'll definitely have an explore.

They recycle everything here!

Campus steps

Wellington Botanic Gardens anyone? :)

The Red Spaceship

There is some serious construction going on on campus

View from the eastern boundary of the campus

So after lunch on Monday, with a first success under my belt, I started my first class in high spirits. My Monday class is listening comprehension, but in reality pretty much all of my classes for the first week were dedicated to pronunciation and distinguishing the various sounds and tones. Both my two teachers were very impressed by my pronunciation and ability to distinguish sounds and tones, at least until they heard me try and put more than one syllable together, or listen to sentences rather than single words. With my linguistics background and a few languages already under my belt, I am able to hear and produce individual sounds pretty well. There were a few sounds I was not doing correctly but with a little correction I was making them "perfectly". Alas, one doesn't speak a language one syllable at a time with breaks in between, and when several of them need to be put together then things quickly break down for me. Having to think of both what one is saying and how one is saying it is pretty complicated, and when you have to change tones depending on what the following tone is (regexp forward-lookup!!!), then it quickly gets too much for my withering old brain. I have a year though, so I'm not getting worried yet :-).

I have two (young) teachers, both of whom are excellent teachers and very nice. He Laoshi  ("teacher He") seems like a bit of a language nerd - she is teaching a super-interesting sounding course on the evolution of Chinese characters - and I may try and sit in on some of the cool stuff she is teaching in the second half of the year. I have listening on Monday afternoons, "comprehensive Chinese" (I haven't quite worked out how it's different from the rest yet...) on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, reading on Thursday morning and spoken Chinese on Friday morning. Due to Monday's Dragon Boat Festival day being a bank holiday, Guo Laoshi asked if we could move this coming Monday's class to Saturday morning, which we duly did. By the end of the week both teachers were pushing me to start watching television - I really, really need to be hearing lots of spoken Chinese and tv/films are a great way to do that.

For the moment I can't watch the actual television, as there is something wrong with the antenna (or more likely antenna socket/cable) - no matter how much playing around I did I never got further than a bright blue screen... China has plenty of websites where you can watch tv and movies online for free, so thanks to my unlimited data mobile connection (40GB at full 4G speeds, then 3mb/s to 100GB, then 256kb/s above that, for around 13€/mth), I started watching some Chinese movies. There are actually plenty of free Western movies but I'm not here to learn English or French! Most of the big sites are actually completely legal - many of the more recent both Chinese and Western movies require a subscription (about 21€ per year), and you get a minute of ads at the beginning on the free movies (if you don't have a subscription). I'll probably get a subscription but will not need it for a while. China is pumping *massive* amounts of money and energy into developing their film industry and the results are starting to get pretty good. I read about a $250M USD budget for a pure Chinese movie (so not a partnership with a Hollywood studio) recently.

I have a different book for each of the 4 classes, though there is a considerable amount of overlap in vocabulary and progression (all 4 deal with pronunciation for the first few chapters, even the reading book!). I have been spending quite a lot of time setting up my Spaced Repetition (flashcards++) software with the vocabulary for the first 15 or so book chapter lessons (I'll probably be doing 1-3 lessons per day over the two-hour classes). I must admit I'm a little surprised/annoyed (frightened?) at how I was able to completely forget so much after only the few months since I stopped working on my Chinese in early March. I went from knowing around 500-600 characters well (you give me the English word, I'll give you the Chinese character(s) and pronunciation) to knowing maybe 100. I definitely don't have to re-learn everything from scratch but it is taking considerably more than just seeing the characters again and associating them with the English words. I would be totally lost with the Anki programme though - even if I forgot lots of stuff after using it, without it I would probably only be learning a fifth of the number of characters/words. Only time will tell how many characters I can durably learn over the long term though!

It lightened up today a little after lunch and just as I was going down the stairs to go for a walk to the big park on the east edge of town, it started raining again! The rain only lasted half an hour or so, so I grabbed my umbrella and set off. By the time I had left the campus the sun was already shining fully and I immediately started to regret not taking a hat. Yuxi is over 1600m up, and the sun is most unforgiving at that altitude. Many women (and a few men) carry sun umbrellas and I can now see why. I don't know whether I'll ever wander around town with a sun umbrella but there will definitely be some slip, slop, slapping going on (in-joke for Kiwis...)! The walk to the park is around 45 minutes and I was able to keep mostly out of the sun. There are trees lining most of the larger streets (does that make them avenues?) which is great for when it just starts raining or the sun is out.

The park is very large on the map but a lot of it is made up of lakes and big concrete squares. It is a "music square" according to Google, and I suppose they organise meetings/concerts there. When the sun is shining it definitely gets hot quick though, so I found some shade and chilled out for a while. As I continued on I stumbled across what I suppose is the local "tourist lookout tower".

The campus is pretty much straight ahead from here I think (though not really visible)

After the fiasco with the coffee this morning I decided to head back to Walmart and work out how I had had such an epic fail. I came across a local supermarket and decided to head in to see whether they had any coffee. Turns out Walmart is maybe 5-10% more expensive (judging from the vinegar I bought at Walmart on Saturday :-)) but it's only about 20 mins walk away vs the 45 minutes to that supermarket, so unless I can find one closer, I'll probably stick to Walmart for the moment. Particularly as the local supermarket didn't appear to even have instant coffee!

I took the long way home and walked quite a bit of the "CBD". The streets are lined with clean looking shops selling everything you might expect to find in Europe, though the number of branded mobile phone shops does seem a bit excessive, particularly as a truly massive proportion of consumption happens online here. I did walk down a pedestrian street that felt a little more "Asian" in terms of the shop fronts and street vendors but it was all very clean and well-to-do - nothing like what it was 20 years ago in Fuzhou or what it was like in Cambodia when I visited there a couple of years ago. Even "poor and backwater" Yuxi (Yunnan is the 2nd poorest province in China) is charging forth into the 21st century with no looking back. Now obviously the countryside is quite a different matter but I suppose even all small Chinese cities have plenty of money for infrastructure and an influx of people (7-10% population growth *per year*) meaning strong economic growth is a foregone conclusion.

The "slightly Asian" looking street

No comment?

I have also started to realise a few of the detractors of living on campus in a dormitory/flat (and I overstated the size - it is probably only around 35m2). It's not that there are loud parties all the time, there aren't (though one of the Thai students spent quite some time emptying his stomach loudly on his balcony last night :-)). As most of the foreigners here are Thai, and I am living in the "foreigners'" dorm, things are pretty quiet. What isn't quiet is the music school that directly faces my balcony! I *hope* they are only practicing from 20h to 22h30 because exams are almost upon them. I am already utterly sick of hearing badly played Kosturica-style music on the accordion and I probably have at least another 3 weeks of it!!!

Otherwise I am slowly starting to get into a rhythm and have most of the administrative (bank, registration, etc.) stuff sorted or planned, so can settle in and really start studying. All good so far.

I'll leave talking about the food till next time! ;)