China – Orientation and First Observations
Well, Kunming is absolutely gorgeous. Beautiful weather, a beautiful city, and incredibly kind and wonderful people. So far I love it here as the city is big enough to be busy and exciting but also small enough to not be overwhelming. I never imagined Kunming to be such a wonderfully interesting city in China.
The group as a whole has not really had much in the way of orientations but we did have a bit of a tour around the city with our language partners on the day after we arrived. Since we are doing an intensive language study here in China, each student has been assigned a language partner to work with for two hours every day after classes. These language partners are all Chinese students who natively speak Mandarin. Also, most of them are planning on teaching Mandarin to foreign speakers once they finish graduate school. This makes our languages learning that much more intense, but also allows for that much more practice time and more opportunities to learn.
Our orientation of sorts was meeting our language partners on a Saturday morning and spending the morning and afternoon with them walking around the city and seeing the sights. Some of the coolest things we did were try some yogurt based fruit drinks, wander around Green Lake Park and see the “tinder-esque” wall along with ride around the lake in paddle boats. The yogurt drinks I tried can be found all over China, but they are impossible to explain. Unfortunately, you just have to try one to get why they are so good! My language partner was kind enough to buy the drink for me as a thank you for the gift I brought her from home. This was somewhat ironic as I brought the gift to thank her for being my language partner, but I accepted the drink anyways as she insisted that she pay. The “tinder-esque” wall in Green Lake Park is a very long, very tall cement wall that the Chinese post photos and profiles on in order to find a husband or wife. This may be crazy to think about, but the ages on the wall ranged from the mid-teens all the way to age 94. According to my language partner, this is very common in China but it was surprising none the less as the wall was almost impossible to walk by from the sheer number of people who were present to look at the posted profiles. Finally, the paddle boats that we took out on Green Lake were simply to explore and have fun, but it was enlightening regardless as we could see more of the park and some of the traditional dances and ceremonies that were occurring throughout the park.
As a little side note, almost every website that I generally use in life is blocked in China, thus communication has been a little tricky so far. Personally, I find this both good and bad. It’s bad because I do miss using social media sites to catch up with my friends and family back home, but it’s good because the blocked websites have taken away one more distraction for me and that allows me to spend more time with my classmates as well as stops me from procrastinating as much. So, as annoying as it is, I think it’ll be good for me for the next two months to not be too connected to the world-wide-web.
