so my week in Kunming is coming to a close. My last full day here is at a slow start (mostly because I'm being a bum and doing stuff on the computer) so I thought I'd check in with my blog.
this week was cool, kunming is different from other cities. it reminded me a lot of Chengde. just in its size and feel. it definitely has tall buildings and city centers, but it still has a small town feeling to it set against a backdrop of mountains everywhere you look. (i'll post pictures once i get back to beijing and have my computer.) Amrollah was in Istanbul until Sunday so Norma and I went out to a different area of the city each day.
so the "English Corner" seems to be an established event around kunming where chinese people can go to practice their english. i've heard mention of them in different places around kunming and every chinese friend i meet seems to know what it is. this could also be because the hemmats have met most, if not all, of their chinese friends through the english corner... so my exposure to it might be biased.
Highlights of the week:
on thursday Jack showed up with his car/bus thing and we drove about 30 minutes or so to the bamboo temple. While most buddhist temples here are basically the same, this one had 500 carved statues of the "luohao" or those that had escaped the cycle of life and death...? i guess they'd reached nirvana.. i dont know, i'm just going by my guide book. anyway, they were cool because each one was completely different. at the time that they were carved (by a sculptor and his 5 assistants) they were seen as so unsettling that the guy was forbidden from creating anything ever again! apparently a lot of the sculptures were thought to be charicatures of his contemporaries... i guess they weren't happy about that.
after the temple, Jack took us to this huge random park nearby. the only cool thing about it was the long suspension bridge we walked across to get there (picture to follow). we just walked and walked and walked and then went back to the car. Jack then dropped us off at Green Lake Park and went to meet his mother for dinner. Norma and I wandered through shops buying little trinkets here and there before heading to a Dai restaurant for dinner. Dai food is... interesting. we got this chicken and pineapple dish (which i asked for and loved hehe) and then this sour-lemony-chicken stuff, a mint soup (that wasnt too bad), some vegetables and rice. we strolled through the park some then went home. the park was cool, there were so many different areas. there were people selling stuff, people walking, even a little rollerblading area for kids. (again, pictures coming)
on friday we decided to go to this huge kunming expo thing that was going on just this weekend. it was the huge complex of about 6 or 7 buildings with wholesale people sitting in booths and stuff trying to sell everything from fruit to jewelry to electronics to whatever else was in the other 4 buildings i didnt make it into. after the whole thing i came away with... a charm for my cell phone! it's really cute and made of pearls. Norma bought some jewelry for her business and then we went home and... to another Dai restaurant! haha, i'm being too mean here... the food is fine, just not something i'd eat every day. anyway, apparently the food wasn't as good as it used to be (Norma ordered dishes she'd had before and liked) so at that point we decided no more Dai food :)
one night we went for foot massages. though foot massage is not at all an exclusive term, apparently. i got a neck, shoulder, arm, leg, foot massage! for like.. a few dollars. not too shabby! they did this crazy thing with my hands though.. they like pressed this point on my arm so that my hand lost circulation and went all white and then they released it and i could feel and SEE the blood rushing back into it. soooo weird.
another highlight of the week was going to see the Muslim Quarter of the city. It's full of pedestrian streets that are cool to explore. Norma told me that there are a lot of Muslims in this area of China, but a lot of them don't know what it's really about. For instance, while muslim restaurants are said to be cleaner than others, a lot of them serve alcohol. oops.
While in the muslim quarter we stumbled upon the Flower and Bird Market, which sells so much more than that. It also has lots of little alleys to explore and little stalls to bargain in. Perhaps the most exotic of the birds I saw were the red, orange and green dyed little chicks amassed in cardboard boxes (pictures to come, i swear). Do you think they'd grow up to be green chickens? or have green eggs? these are the things that keep me up at night.
yesterday (Monday) we went to the Stone Forest (Shi Lin). It's this area about a 2 hour bus ride away that was under water 200,000,000 years ago. Because of this there are all these crazy limestone formations everywhere. Amrollah, Norma and I got a woman dressed all up in minority clothing to take us around in a little car (we got there kind of late and there was no way we'd see anything on foot!). She'd let us out to explore and take pictures at times. About half way through, Amrollah's camera ran out of memory, but we still had mine. Unfortunately, my camera chose that precise moment to run out of battery. So Amrollah erased some pictures to take a few more, so I might have to wait a bit before I get those pictures. Anyway, the place was awesome. While exploring at times it seriously did feel like walking through a forest except, well, instead of trees there were ginormous rocks.
After we got back to town, we took a bus to a city center area and walked around. I could have kicked myself for not charging my camera! It was full of people and cars and huge buildings and traditional chinese gates and blind masseurs and everything! aka, the stuff I love to take pictures of. oh well, there's always next year :)
Dinner tonight was a nice mix of cultures... we had some chinese stirfry noodles with vegetables, some persian rice with meat and then good old fashioned spaghetti with meatballs. quite the spread. anyway, now i'm packing up my room to go to the airport in the morning now... i'm getting a little worried about the amount of stuff i'm going to have accumulated by the time I leave China... last year I didn't buy hardly anything... perhaps I'm making up for it now... I wish I could get rid of all this business attire I have with me from the first month... no way I'll need it again. anyway, back to work!
this week was cool, kunming is different from other cities. it reminded me a lot of Chengde. just in its size and feel. it definitely has tall buildings and city centers, but it still has a small town feeling to it set against a backdrop of mountains everywhere you look. (i'll post pictures once i get back to beijing and have my computer.) Amrollah was in Istanbul until Sunday so Norma and I went out to a different area of the city each day.
so the "English Corner" seems to be an established event around kunming where chinese people can go to practice their english. i've heard mention of them in different places around kunming and every chinese friend i meet seems to know what it is. this could also be because the hemmats have met most, if not all, of their chinese friends through the english corner... so my exposure to it might be biased.
Highlights of the week:
on thursday Jack showed up with his car/bus thing and we drove about 30 minutes or so to the bamboo temple. While most buddhist temples here are basically the same, this one had 500 carved statues of the "luohao" or those that had escaped the cycle of life and death...? i guess they'd reached nirvana.. i dont know, i'm just going by my guide book. anyway, they were cool because each one was completely different. at the time that they were carved (by a sculptor and his 5 assistants) they were seen as so unsettling that the guy was forbidden from creating anything ever again! apparently a lot of the sculptures were thought to be charicatures of his contemporaries... i guess they weren't happy about that.
after the temple, Jack took us to this huge random park nearby. the only cool thing about it was the long suspension bridge we walked across to get there (picture to follow). we just walked and walked and walked and then went back to the car. Jack then dropped us off at Green Lake Park and went to meet his mother for dinner. Norma and I wandered through shops buying little trinkets here and there before heading to a Dai restaurant for dinner. Dai food is... interesting. we got this chicken and pineapple dish (which i asked for and loved hehe) and then this sour-lemony-chicken stuff, a mint soup (that wasnt too bad), some vegetables and rice. we strolled through the park some then went home. the park was cool, there were so many different areas. there were people selling stuff, people walking, even a little rollerblading area for kids. (again, pictures coming)
on friday we decided to go to this huge kunming expo thing that was going on just this weekend. it was the huge complex of about 6 or 7 buildings with wholesale people sitting in booths and stuff trying to sell everything from fruit to jewelry to electronics to whatever else was in the other 4 buildings i didnt make it into. after the whole thing i came away with... a charm for my cell phone! it's really cute and made of pearls. Norma bought some jewelry for her business and then we went home and... to another Dai restaurant! haha, i'm being too mean here... the food is fine, just not something i'd eat every day. anyway, apparently the food wasn't as good as it used to be (Norma ordered dishes she'd had before and liked) so at that point we decided no more Dai food :)
one night we went for foot massages. though foot massage is not at all an exclusive term, apparently. i got a neck, shoulder, arm, leg, foot massage! for like.. a few dollars. not too shabby! they did this crazy thing with my hands though.. they like pressed this point on my arm so that my hand lost circulation and went all white and then they released it and i could feel and SEE the blood rushing back into it. soooo weird.
another highlight of the week was going to see the Muslim Quarter of the city. It's full of pedestrian streets that are cool to explore. Norma told me that there are a lot of Muslims in this area of China, but a lot of them don't know what it's really about. For instance, while muslim restaurants are said to be cleaner than others, a lot of them serve alcohol. oops.
While in the muslim quarter we stumbled upon the Flower and Bird Market, which sells so much more than that. It also has lots of little alleys to explore and little stalls to bargain in. Perhaps the most exotic of the birds I saw were the red, orange and green dyed little chicks amassed in cardboard boxes (pictures to come, i swear). Do you think they'd grow up to be green chickens? or have green eggs? these are the things that keep me up at night.
yesterday (Monday) we went to the Stone Forest (Shi Lin). It's this area about a 2 hour bus ride away that was under water 200,000,000 years ago. Because of this there are all these crazy limestone formations everywhere. Amrollah, Norma and I got a woman dressed all up in minority clothing to take us around in a little car (we got there kind of late and there was no way we'd see anything on foot!). She'd let us out to explore and take pictures at times. About half way through, Amrollah's camera ran out of memory, but we still had mine. Unfortunately, my camera chose that precise moment to run out of battery. So Amrollah erased some pictures to take a few more, so I might have to wait a bit before I get those pictures. Anyway, the place was awesome. While exploring at times it seriously did feel like walking through a forest except, well, instead of trees there were ginormous rocks.
After we got back to town, we took a bus to a city center area and walked around. I could have kicked myself for not charging my camera! It was full of people and cars and huge buildings and traditional chinese gates and blind masseurs and everything! aka, the stuff I love to take pictures of. oh well, there's always next year :)
Dinner tonight was a nice mix of cultures... we had some chinese stirfry noodles with vegetables, some persian rice with meat and then good old fashioned spaghetti with meatballs. quite the spread. anyway, now i'm packing up my room to go to the airport in the morning now... i'm getting a little worried about the amount of stuff i'm going to have accumulated by the time I leave China... last year I didn't buy hardly anything... perhaps I'm making up for it now... I wish I could get rid of all this business attire I have with me from the first month... no way I'll need it again. anyway, back to work!
1 comment:
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
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