March 29
We left Chiang Mai at 7:30pm on Tuesday, and arrived in Kunming, China at around 9pm. We took taxis to the Sakura Hotel (sakura means cherry blossom, and it's a former Holiday Inn, so--NICE!). Kunming is a large sprawling city at the foot of a small mountain with a large lake on the edge of town (I only saw this from the plane on the way out). The flight from Chaing mai to Kunming was about 90 minutes, and the temperature dropped about 30 degrees!
On Wednesday we slept late, had a leisurely breakfast in the hotel then laid low around the hotel until lunchtime when we went to the hotel restaurant for one last Thai meal. We caught our flight to Guiyang at 4pm and arrived here at 5pm. Jake and Monica's collegue, Doerthe (she's a German woman working with Jake on the bilingual education project) had arranged a van to bring us from the airport to Huaxi, the town in which they lived for 3 years. Huaxi is about 30 miles from Guiyang's airport, part of the drive was through the city and part of it was out of the city and winding around the hills and formations in the area.
I don't know how to describe the geography around the city. There are tall, conical hills, perhaps 500-900 feet high. Some are shaped like cones, some like pedestals, some are randomly eroded into odd shapes. Some are covered in vegetation, some have been dug out for stone, cement and minerals. They separate the different villages from each other's sight... as we drove out of the city, we'd come around a hill and find another small city in a valley between a series of these geographic structures. They appeared to be farmed in places, with large flat places carved into them and planted with crops. Rape is in bloom right now, as well as some trees with pink blossoms. Because it's considered sub-tropical here, there is an abundance of fruit sold on the street... half pinapples on sticks, mangos, oranges, limes, apples, oranges, watermelons... it's a feast for my Minnesota eyes!!
The largest university in this provence (Guizhou) is located in Huaxi. There are about 500,000 students at this university, and it has recently been promoted to a top-level university in China. There is a very large language research center here, which is the reason so many of Jake and Monica's colleagues live here.
The city is so interesting!! Just behind the downtown area, there are rows and rows of cement apartment buildings, 7 to 10 stories high, with 12 to 30 apartments in each building. All of the windows and patios have bars on them for safety, and there are small courtyards in between them. The streets are made of concrete and stone, and everything looks 30 to 50 years old, even though it's relatively new. On the bottom level of many of the apartment buildings are shops, restaurants and merchant stands. Dogs run loose around the streets and are remarkably uninterested in the human activity. They're more like rats that don't make people scream. ;-) I can totally see how they'd be considered a source of nutrition... they're self sufficient, easy to find and not integrated into people's homes. Some people have dogs, I've seen sellers with small dogs tied to their carts, so some people have them as pets, but the street dogs are not treated as pets.
We ate in a small 'hot pot' restaurant today for lunch. The tables all have a hole cut into the tabletop with a propane burning ring underneath the hole. Meals are brought out in a large, shallow stainless steel bowl and set down into the hole in the tabletop. The burner comes on to keep the food hot. Each restaurant has it's own hotpot recipe that they specialize in. Today we ate at the Red Bean Hot Pot, so the meal was a broth with meat, red beans, bean sprouts, mushrooms, tomatoes in the simmering broth. They brought out a basket of greens--lettuce, chard, pea plants, cabbage and some kind of ivy, and plates with potatoes and er-kuai-ba (a gelatinous paste, similar to tofu, made from rice). We put the potatoes and er kuai ba into the simmering broth and we each got a bowl of rice. Everyone at the table ladles out some juice, then picks outwhat they want from the pot and dips it into a spicy dipping sauce, then picking up a bit of rice on the bite. Bits of the greens are put into the soup, then cooked for a minute or so before eating them, and the potatoes and er kuai ba cook the longest. Everyone eats out of the central pot, and the table gets covered in the broth. It's awesome.
The sound of this city is defined to me by roosters, street callers and car horns. Even though there are only high apartment buildings, people keep chickens and roosters on their patios and in the tiny gardens on the ground level. Because the streets are concrete tunnels and the buildings are so high, the roosters sound surreal. I thought they were coming from some kind of loudspeaker for some reason. Jake just laughed at me when I asked about them... I thought maybe it was a call to prayer, an announcement that the markets were opening, a political alert or something... they sure sounded LOUD and not like real roosters! Everything echos off the buildings and resonates amazingly. Children talking in the street sound like they're on our balcony, and the people in the apartment behind us sound like they're in the next room. The windows are single pane glass, so don't offer much protection from the outside temperatures or noise.
Average temps here are in the high 50's during the day, mid 40's at night. The inside temps are probably 60 to 65 degrees, cooler at night. There are space heaters in the rooms, but they're expensive to run. In many homes, you'll find a 'hot box', which is a wooden box (approx 2' wide by 3-4' long)with an electrical element inside the bottom of it. There's an aluminum sheet over the element, then a wooden grate above the element. The hot boxes are set in front of a chair or sofa and people sit with their feet in the box and a blanket over their legs to hold in the heat. They're pretty slick! It is quite humid here, so one family we ate with has built a mini-hot-box for their dry goods. It's a wooden box, about two feet square with a light on a timer inside it that comes on periodically to reduce the humidity and keep the spices/dry goods dry.
For dinner, we went to a very nice restaurant with friends of Jake and Monica. We had a feast of amazing food!!! Beans with pickled vegetables, spices and hot pepper; breaded Japanese eggplant, stuffed with ground meat and sauced with sweet and sour sauce; spicy scrambled eggs with tomato garlic and chives; chive pies stuffed with eggs and chinese garlic; julienned potatoes with green and red peppers, sauteed greens (probably rape leaves and stems); tofu in brown sauce with peppers, greens, onions, wood-ear mushrooms; and steamed eggs with ham, tofu, peas and carrots. Each dish was put onto a huge lazy susan and we all took bowls of rice and then bits of each dish onto our rice or plates. Once again, it was awesome!!
We walked home from the restaurant in the dark... the streets are still crawling with foot, bicycle and motorbike traffic. The shops are all open, and another thing that is new to me is shops and restaurants being outdoors all the time! The ones with walls/doors keep their doors open, others are set up on the sidewalks every day, with just a tiny part of the store inside. I forget that in some places in the world, there isn't snow all winter!
That's all for tonight.
Wish you were here!
