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
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? :-)
