Grow Blog

This first week has been eventful, exciting even. But exhausting at the same time. It seems we are starting everything from scratch: outfitting the apartment, learning to navigate, assessing the level of my students.

To start with we have been buying lots of basics for the apartment: plates, bowls, chopsticks. But I hear from my other Fulbrighters that they are working on the same tasks. Even the students on campus are doing much the same thing! The night before classes started the local super-duper-market was filled with young people buying essentially the same things as us:

From Wuhan Arrival

Toilet paper, instant noodles, Pringles. That first night we were still lacking a refrigerator, so were still in snack mode. I think we quickly got tired of restaurants, because frozen potstickers were on the menu before the end of the week. This is doubly strange since factory-made ones from the store cost exactly what hand-made fresh ones do on the street. But there’s something about eating at home that appealed to us (something other than instant noodles, yoghurt chilled on the balcony, and Pringles that is).

By Wednesday I was ready to just take a day off from the logistics of teaching and settling, so we set off across the river to Hankou—the central business district of the city, and home to its art museum. We had hoped for Belgian brew-pub food, but the Lonely Planet recommended restaurant had moved 10 months earlier, and there was no evidence that it had ever been at its advertised location anyway. It took an embarrassing number of minutes of walking up and down the street before thinking to call their phone number. Interestingly, the same friend who called in the middle of our wandering (which reminded me that I had a phone) called last night asking me about the exact same restaurant. In an even more amazing piece of serendipity, we were having yet another navigation problem at the exact same time! The campus bus, which I thought we had mastered, went backwards on its route!

Today (Saturday afternoon) brought another navigation error: this time by myself on the bus. I missed my stop by a long shot. Things started looking edge-city-ish, so I abandoned the bus and ducked into a coffeeshop and had the waitress point to where we were on the map. Sure enough: I was a good 3 miles past my intended destination. A quick cab ride brought me back to my intended destination: an intersection that includes multiple department stores and the one place that I know will sell me actual coffee rather than instant. So here I sit at Startbucks with a ½ kilo of medium-ground beans in my backpack. They share the space with ham, cheese, bread, pasta, and tomato sauce.

Please don’t think we’re soft. Sure, we had KFC last night. But I had the crabs!

From Wuhan Arrival

L picked the location, I suppose thinking it would be familiar and easy to negotiate (we’re never quite sure what we’re going to get in a Chinese restaurant). I didn’t have the heart to warn her ahead of time that negotiating Chinese fast food is often more difficult than throwing yourself on the mercy of the 服务员 at a restaurant. （Think about it: ‘you want fries with that?’ ‘you know, if you get a combo meal, it’s cheaper.’ ‘The crabs take a few minutes’）I was also heartless enough to send her downstairs to get the food herself. It took her about 20 minutes.

All this said, there are many familiar things and we have plenty of friends to help us. The first week of class here is much like the first week of class anywhere else: right down to the first lab assignment:

From Wuhan Arrival

OK, it’s time for me to go buy a pot to boil our spaghetti in. And figure out exactly what sort of vessel I am going to make my coffee with.
(Click on any of the photos to see the whole album, or follow this here link.)

We arrived without incident in Kunming after a loooooong full day of travel. We left our hotel room at 6am on Thursday and arrived at our Chinese hotel at 11pm Friday. Realtime, about 22 hours of travel time. It would have been longer but we had really short layovers between our three flights. Everything was very smooth—including the United transfer person who intercepted us at PEK to help us check into our China Eastern flight (and huckstered us for a small tip—which was just fine and dandy, since we would have had to negotiate our slightly overweight (by Chinese standards) bags.

The hotel that the American Embassy arranged is fantastic. It’s a little more expensive than we would typically pick on our own (about $120 a night—cheap for a major American city, but troubling to my Slavic sense of frugality), but we are only paying for the first two nights—the rest is on the Embassy. The amenities include a picture window from the bathtub out into the room, a view of Green Lake, fruit, candy, and an electronic peephole. Speaking of the bathtub: it has a television.

Green Lake itself is a crazy party. Yesterday morning I went out early to find competing styles of dance, old ladies having their calluses scraped, a choir, a brass band, and at least three minority groups in costume. We are totally unsure if everyone is local or if people are here on holiday (we are still very much in Chinese New Year mode). Most likely it’s some combination.

The park got pretty crowded as the morning wore on, and the exercisers gave way to strollers and children and vendors selling hot dog buns to feed the seagulls (which are apparently paying their annual four month visit from Siberia).

The highlight, I think, was a golden retriever who could do math. His master would say: “Yellow dog: what is 10 minus 2?” And the dog would bark 8 times. The math eventually got complicated enough that I couldn’t follow it. So obviously the dog’s Chinese is better than mine.

From Kunming 1

L was still hibernating in the womb of the hotel, so I set out away from the park and into the city. Oddly, I immediately found myself standing outside a building that looked a lot like the provincial libraries I visited in 2007: big grand entrance stairway, 5 story building, and a taller skinnier closed-stack storage tower behind it. Sure enough: a man confirmed that this was indeed the Yunnan Provincial Library. (I couldn’t quite remember the character for province, and haven’t memorized Yunnan yet—I just remembered that the nan is south.)

Inside, I found more similarities: big atrium, a multi-lingual bas relief sculpture extolling the virtues of learning, and a selection of topical reading rooms. Unlike 2007, not every reading room was overflowing.—except for the self study rooms, which were jam packed with high school-aged students preparing for college entrance exams.

After a quick poke-around, I was very tempted to chat up the foreign-language reading room librarian about what she wished she had learned in library school, but I chickened out. What I did discover was a card catalog! But how useful is an author index when there are about 20 drawers devoted just to Lee?

Continuing on my walk, I explored a couple side streets, went into a cellphone mall (yes, a multi-floor shopping center filled only with cellphone stores), found what I later confirmed to be a blind massage parlor (we went the next morning), and stumbled back to the lake for a snack of chuar and a flatbread stuffed with cabbage and mystery meat. Later in the day, while standing in the hotel lobby discussing the relative merits of fancy-hotel salad bar (avoid the raw un-dressed vegetables) L and my embassy contact gently scolded me for eating street food on my first day in China. I did resist the fried gnocchi-looking things (which were not fried on-site). At dinner I think we identified these as being fried goat cheese. At the restaurant these turned out to be a bit bland, but on the street they come with chili powder. We dredged ours through the buttery garlic sauce that our cabbage came in. Delicious.

Maybe today we’ll try the street version.

L did emerge from the hotel for dinner. We took Lonely Planet’s recommendation and headed to a student hangout near Yunnan University. It was a fantastic meal, totaled less than 1 hotel breakfast buffet, and strengthened our belief in the Lonely Planet. The only drawback was the miniature tables and extremely low ceiling. Or maybe that was atmosphere.

Overall first impressions of Kunming? Lovely. And it is springlike—not just because it’s spring. The air quality so far is better than most of the cities I’ve been to in China. I’m very much looking forward to exploring the city a bit more in the coming days—too bad meetings start tomorrow.

A friend wrote that as a bon voyage a while back. It had been taped to my kitchen wall. I never did memorize it, but fan feng shun is a good phrase for the week. Google translates it as ’smooth sailing,’ but more literally it means ’sail in the same direction as the wind.’ I have no idea if it’s an old phrase, but I like that ‘may the wind always be at your back’ is a cross-cultural idea.

And the wind has been firmly behind us, as our plan is executing itself nicely. It’s busy, but every task has been getting accomplished. There have yet to be any disasters. And now we are sitting in a hotel waiting for the caretaker of our car to come take us to a hotel closer to the airport. There, we will say goodbye to the stormtrooper wagon (for now) and we’ll hang out for the afternoon and evening before leaving in the morning for Kunming.

I’ve put zero effort into planning tourist activities in Kunming. We are basically going a couple days early just to get over jetlag and to loosen our Chinese tongues. I’ll schedule out the first few weeks of classes too–it will be a good test of my course-planning. Theoretically, I have all the necessary readings on my laptop, and my bibliography is living in the cloud.

The little baby scanner that L talked me into is working great. It’s enabled us to put all sorts of things into the cloud–and I like that. It is making our load lighter, and will greatly improve our bookkeeping. Speaking of which: we appear to be leaving Santa Barbara with our finances mostly intact. In other words: we are almost right on budget.

The next update should be from the eternal spring city. Stay tuned.