Week 1: First Impressions

你好，云南。 Hello, Yunnan. Hello, dusty highways marked with cars, small trucks laden with vegetables, heads of lettuce piled high and clinging for dear beheaded life in the open air. Hello, Kunming, city of eternal springtime, streets chattering with cars, scooters, bicycles, people, older apartments gathering grime, new apartments lurching out of the earth, restaurant stalls warm with conversation and smacking mouths. And then to Tonghai, smaller, but not without a scattershot of western-style shops, Backstreet Boys mingling with Chinese pop, while Buddhist temples peek from the outskirts, relatively still, focused on something. Go inside the town, wind through the alleyways. A local primary school just got out, so there are smiles--hidden behind palms, but still smiles--and giggles for your escort to the Daoist temple, tucked into the folds of the town (unlike the Buddhists, who are still looking down from their quiet hillsides) and filled with old men smoking tobacco from their water-bongs and slapping down mahjong tiles, as if both well aware and oblivious to the ancient stone drums lining the wall beside them. But go! A moment for thousand-year-old things, and then go. The local Mongolians have made a feast, with rice and beef and eel and fried crickets. They sing songs that have traveled through long leagues of time and space, they give you tiny cups of baijiu for toasting. The local Han city officials will do the same, but you have to sing too--an exchange of falcetto-encrusted Chinese opera for a two-verse rendition of Yellow Submarine works fine. Hello, last swatch of a people, the old ladies (but to be more respectful, say they have a high age) who bind their feet, who dance with flutes and swords while their grand-children (great-grand-children?) bicycle by in Calvin Klein jeans. Hello highway back to Kunming, flanked by neatly-partitioned farmlands, bent backs over terraced greens, and checkpoints (is that a sickle and hammer?) all along the way, and then, Kunming, hello again.

To be more clear, I guess, it has been quite the first week. The flight was long, but we've been treated incredibly well since arrival. My program-mates are all great people, and also make for a wide-array of folks. Likewise, the English-language major students that we've met have been really friendly, albeit a little shy, and I've been repeatedly told that they think I'm funny because I smile so much. I can't help it though, because I'm just too excited: living here, learning here, everything. But the single most thing I'm looking foreward to is the ISP (independent study project), when I will get to go off on my own and study what I want to. Right now I'd really like to study the intersection of traditional music and religion in the Naxi minority, OR study the vegetarian cooking techniques and beliefs surrounding them in a Buddhist monestary, OR find a communinity where I can study a specific strain of shamanism.

There is much to do.

To sum up the first week of being here: I am humbled, and there is a lot of adapting. Stripped of using English (my security blanket language, my comfort language), I have to push myself, re-arrange myself, rebuild myself with hand gestures, facial expressions, and a slowly growing set of basic phrases. Changes and mechanisms are going off like crazy beneath my surface, and I feel that I am only aware of a small fraction of them.

-S

more pictures soon.