So today is the Mid-Autumn festival in China. It’s one of the three major holidays in China. (The other two being Dragon Boat festival and the Chinese New Year). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-autumn_festival We don’t really know exactly what’s the deal with the festival- other then the legends behind its celebration and that we were tired of moon cakes before the day even started. Moon cakes are the Mid-Autumn festival 'treat,' though I haven’t found them to be overly appetizing. As with most Chinese treats, they normally find 'different' flavors appealing. Red bean is a common 'sweet' flavor, or the especially 'delicious' 'cakes' contain cured meat, or an egg yolk with meat, coconut, lotus. . . (I couldn’t even try the egg yolk ones, especially after my roommate, Kara, took one bite, spit it out and had to go out to buy a bar of Dove chocolate (the only kind that is available in China) to get the taste out of her mouth.
This is a picture of the few remaining "Bound foot Women" (Lao Tai Tai) in Tonghai. (Our orientation destination.) Some of the women's feet are only 3 INCHES!! long.
[Disclaimer: This is probably going to be a long recap- I’ve been horrible at keeping up with blogging/journaling. ]
Temple outside of Tonghai, China
HISTORY AND RELIGIONS
As you’ll see from what shall be a long entry, our first seminar is 'History and Religions,' meaning that most of our lectures, readings and field trips are related to China’s history and the major religions of Buddhism, Daoism, Islam and Christianity. I have now seen many a Buddist/Daoist temple, just the other day we went to a Hui mosque, (Hui is the minority name for most Muslims in China. It is rather interesting to see the Muslim population here- they’re very integrated into society, some women wear a head scarves, but many choose not too, all universities are required to have a Muslim cafeteria that doesn’t serve pork, and it’s the only minority grouping in China based on religion. Its also just cool to see some parts of China with signs in Chinese and Arabic- its like doubly illegible to me.) And today we went to visit the Miao people who live in a relatively remote village (think dirt roads winding and winding up a mountain, but its only about an hour and a half from Kunming) and were converted to Christianity by German missionaries. I had been looking forward to this because after all the temple visits I realized I wasn’t really as religiously aware/open minded as I thought. I just had a hard time grasping the concepts of Enlightenment and THE Buddha, versus living Buddas, since it was outside my monotheistic traditions. (It was just the flip side, like if you haven’t heard of Christian ideas and then you are told biblical stories, they sound a bit odd at first.)
Ever since going to Guatemala and seeing a small room in someone’s house that had been lovingly decorated and set up as a chapel, I think churches in developing countries are very interesting. This one was no different – I’d never heard a service in Chinese before, men sat on the pews on one side, women and children sat on the other. There were sparse decorations on the wall, no alter, but there was a very large flat screen television. In fact, everyone in the village had a television! Apparently, the village choirs were so good that they competed in music competitions in Beijing and around the world and so the government rewarded the village by giving every family a tv! This remains a small rural village, with simple conditions- however- every household has a tv. Oh China. . .
TEMPLES. . Temples. . .and more temples. . .
Quick run through of the temples- We went to one in Tonghai during our orientation- highlight of that one was the delicious vegan meal (see food blog entry). Another was outside of Tonghai that was very beautiful. All of these have been really nice to go to in that I really don’t think many other Westerners ever go to these temples as tourists.
Men Playing Mahjong? in a Confucian Temple
ADVENTURES
The third temple that I went to was called Qiongzhu Si (Bamboo temple) as part of our 'Kunming' drop-off.
SIT (the study abroad company that this trip is run by) has a very unique format among study abroad programs, and they are especially proud of this idea of the 'drop-off.' The idea is to prepare us for the independent travel we’ll be doing for the last month of the program. Our 'drop-off' assignment (our- being myself, Tal, and Joe, other SIT group members) was written in characters on a piece of paper and we were given 150 yuan and told to be back by 4pm. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out what the characters were (mostly because the first person we asked on the street told us the wrong pinyin for the first character) so when we got to our dorms to try and figure it out with our dictionaries and our online dictionaries we had yet to figure out where we were supposed to go. (We knew it was something Bamboo temple, but we had no idea where or how to get there. In a strange twist of 'resource utilization' I asked James in the US, if in his intense researching on Kunming, he had seen anything about a Bamboo temple. Ten seconds later. . he’s found a link with info about the place and pictures of it, which confirmed the characters. . .[J-Thanks again ☺] ) Finally knowing where we were going we asked our building guard if he knew how to get there- he did and we recommended the bus as our best option. From our limited understanding of his directions, we thought that he had said we could take bus X to stop Y and get off and change buses to get there. But no. We get off the bus at the right stop and are immediately accosted by little women talking about the temple and taxis to get there (we realize this in retrospect). But they’re unofficial taxis and we have no idea how much farther away the temple is and we’re confused. Hesitant, we hail an official taxi- but he wants to charge us 2X as much! Fifty yuan! So we ended up trying out luck with the 25 kuai (the colloquial word for yuan or renmenbi) unofficial taxi. It turned out to be the right thing – the taxi took us out of the city and up Yu’an mountain right to the temple. The temple was just another temple, we had a good vegan food, really good tea, but it was really the adventure of getting there and back that made it memorable.
The 4th temple was Western Hills (Xi Shan 西山 ) 'Most famous tourist site Kunming.' This visit was SO much fun. A small group of us ended up hiking across a part of the miniature stone forest. (Literally at some times climbing up rocks, or pushing branches out of the way on overgrown paths.)
People doing dances and exercises in Kunming SquareEVERYDAY LIFE
On normal class days, class starts at 8, with my roommate Kara and I showing up to breakfast (if we’re lucky) by quarter of. My first class is almost 2 hours! with Lou LaoShi and four other students. Then we meet up with the rest of the group for about 25 minutes of taiji, before going back up seven flights of stairs for round two of Chinese class until 12 noon. (We’ve had audiences for our taiji sessions! One day we were having class on the basketball court and in between classes a sizable crowded gathered to watch the silly Westerners attempt taiji – I’m waiting for a video to show up on youtube or something).
In the afternoons we have lectures and or watch movies about Chinese history. Thursday afternoon lecture was very interesting because we first watched a short film about a Chinese artist who had grown up, essentially, worshipping Mao and his account of living through the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, etc. THEN, our academic director ushered in a little old Chinese man, who was apparently 87, but had spent 20 years of his life in prison after the Cultural Revolution because he had 'foreign connections' and wouldn’t denounce Christianity. (As a child he had learned English, German, and some Japanese, he was at one point a translator for the US Army and he worked at the Kunming Foreign Ministry – of course he knew foreigners). But his wife had to denounce him so that she could keep her job, his children couldn’t go to normal school because they were associated with him, and he didn’t get out of prison until he was 60 years old. He (understandably) absolutely despised Mao, calling him a dictator, tyrant, etc (which while the West has never really been overly fond of Mao, to hear a Chinese person in China speak this way was very interesting). He adored Deng Xiao Ping and it was just amazing to hear him tell his stories because he had been through so much, but was very jovial and did not come across as a bitter man (Which, given his life’s story, it would have been completely understandable if he was.)
In cramming two weeks into a blogging nutshell I'm sure I left some stuff out. . . All in all, its been fun. I'd like to think that by now I'm settled and will hopefully start becoming more comfortable in Kunming.
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