Catching up again

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So I'm here in Kunming, visiting my girlfriend Swan, because I have a long 5 day weekend. I haven't published anything in a while so i'll try my best to recreate the past few days:

We were supposed to have a karaoke party on Friday with the students going to NC State this summer, but the GRE was saturday, so they were cramming all day and as such would be unable to go to karaoke night.

We went to a show that was choreographed by the same guy that made the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics. The whole show was done in the water. The stage was about 6 inches below the water surface, but it looked like they were just walking on water the whole time. The internet in this hotel room is terrible so I'll upload pictures when I get back.

Friday night I had a 4 hour conversation with Gu Yan, the girl in my group. We talked about philosophy, differences in culture, death, religion, engineering, chinese parents, all kinds of things. It was great. The Chinese students are planning on taking us to West Lake sometime and showing us around, and they are also going to take us to watch the dragon boat races on Wednesday.

Saturday morning I caught a cab and then caught an airport shuttle to Hangzhou airport. I was actually able to communicate in Chinese to the cab driver "take me to wuling square's airport shuttle" and then I was able to ask a bus driver if I had found the airport shuttle. I caught a 3 hour plane to Kunming without any problems. When I got to Kunming, there was a really long line to wait for taxis. There was a lady there and she asked where I was headed to and I told her "WuYi Lu" or WuYi road. She said "Ok, 16", which is about how much it would cost for me to take a cab, so I decided to go with her. She didn't take me to a cab, but her husbands car. They took me to where I was supposed to go and when I handed her 20 she said "No i said 60! Not 16!", which is way more expensive than it would've been to take a cab. I managed to bargain it down to 40 but that's still more than twice what it would've cost to take a cab.
So it’s 1 o’clock, I don’t have swan’s number, and she doesn’t call me until about 7 o’clock. In the meantime I read, explore, and play with my Rubik’s Cube. She calls at 7 and I tell her I’m at the park on WuYi road, but apparently there are three of them and only two of them that Swan is aware of. I happened to be at the one she wasn’t aware of. After about an hour of confusion, I find one of her friends and we meet up at the hotel. We watched Argentina beat Nigeria in the World Cup at Theresa’s. We ordered a pizza with ham, onion, and pineapple on it and it was really good. There was a second world cup game at 2:30 in the morning, but I’d gotten up early to catch a plane so I didn’t stay up to watch and just fell asleep.
Sunday we woke up around 9:00 but breakfast closed at 8:30. I find it very difficult to eat breakfast in China because I usually wake up right when breakfast stops being served. Swan’s roommate was kind of sick and spent most of the day indoors. Swan and I walked around Kunming and found a Pepsi festival of some kind, got some free Pepsi, and then found a bakery. I had bread and Pepsi for breakfast, which is unusual, but it wasn’t that bad. After some more exploring, we came back and watched “How to Train Your Dragon”; one of the bootlegged DVD’s that I’d bought at the night market. It wasn’t bad and Swan’s roommate enjoyed it since she’d been cooped up in the room all day. The movie ended right when a bunch of Swan’s friends wanted to go eat, so we went to this Korean restaurant for lunch. We got some kind of pancakes with octopus on it, cabbage, ribs, beef with clear noodles, tofu, pork, all kinds of things. Everybody shared and it ended up costing about 40 Yuan per person, about 7 US dollars. Swan pretty much did homework for the rest of the day and still didn’t finish. For dinner we found a small, cheap restaurant that had some veggie dishes (Swan’s roommate is a vegetarian) and it also had pictures. I was able to ask the cashier if certain dishes had meat in them and Swan taught her roommate the character for meat, so that she would avoid it. From my experience, it is very difficult to be a vegetarian in China.

So now it’s Monday morning and I’m waiting for Swan to get out of her class so we can go get some lunch. I woke up early today to watch the NBA finals, but the power went out in the hotel. Not wanting to sit in the room, I went out and explored. I looked through the two parks that Swan looked through when I told her I was in a park. The first park was fairly small but the second one was called Green Lake Park, and it was pretty large. There were old people everywhere doing things to be active. I saw singers, power walkers, dancers, musicians, tai chi, and people practicing martial arts. I won’t go too far into detail because that’s the next blog entry. Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with these entries, but I haven’t had very good internet-in my defense.
Some random quotes I want to write down before I forget them.
“How do you spell David?”
“G-A-M-E”
-Tan responding to a Chinese student's question
“I used to be good at pronounciations.”
-A guy named steel in our Chinese class
“First he wrote Chervolet, then he crossed it out and wrote Chelvoret, then he crossed it out and wrote Ford.”
-Avery, talking about his friend painting a name onto his truck's bumper
Wo jiao Xiansheng Mcgee.
-Xiansheng Mcgee

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Comments

[Heather]

I enjoyed your China post! The food situation sounds interesting! How was the Chinese pizza!? My blog is looking for travel photos, reviews, etc, to share. If you have the time, check it out at dirty-hippies.blogspot.com, or email me at [e-mail]. Continued fun with your classes! Heather :)