He said to us that he was selling pets, but everyone I spoke to afterwards said it is for food, and therefore illegal.
We finally managed to organise JD's flight simulator visit today - a treat promised for his birthday back in March! He had been before, along with 50 other kids for a brief 15 minute "flight". But planes are JD's passion and he very much wants to be a pilot when he grows up.
I've been giving JD English/Maths work during the holiday (only 30-40 mins from me, compared to the daily 1-2 hours Chinese from the school!) but I try and make mine as interesting and fun as possible. We've worked out how much water is in the local swimming pool, the area of various pan lids and, for English, a project writing up the specs of various aircraft (JD's passion).  But today's homework was for JD to work out how to get to the Wanda Towers (a landmark shopping mall across the city) by public transport in time for a McDonalds lunch! He worked out the best route using my phone app (walk, underground, change trains, bus, walk) and then we went and tried it out. JD took the lead, using underground maps, bus timetables and asking locals for help where necessary. I just tagged along! We arrived 12.10pm - perfect.
We planned a different route back over an ice-cream and got back home two hours later. I am hoping JD might gradually pick up the bug for independent travel as I once did in my teens.
 We're back from our holiday in Dali.
And yes, we fnjoyed ourselves. We grabbed our last chance for a swim in the outdoor neighbourhood pool yesterday before heading back to Kunming today.  The pool was pretty cold, but JD managed 500m of fast-improving breaststroke before calling it a day.
 With the weather turning a little wetter and our limbs a bit sore from walking around town and climbing mountains, we've taken a couple of more relaxing days exploring our more immediate surroundings. We've been renting the house of a friend of mine, and her large neighbourhood boasts a play area for kids, basketball and tennis courts, an outdoor swimming pool, table tennis tables, a sand pit, streams and ponds. So JD has been learning to play ping-pong, digging tunnels and trying to catch some minnows, when he's not doing his daily homework!   We climbed a mountain yesterday morning to visit a Nunnery we had heard about. Sadly, after taking over an hour to get there, the coffee bar, cactus displays and gift shop detracted from any authentic religious interest and we left quickly.  We did have a nice vegetarian lunch at the nearby GanTong Temple (though twice the price of the Temple in Kunming where we sometimes eat).
Afterwards, we took a cable car further up the mountain and enjoyed some exploring of the ponds and cliffs there. After taking a tuk-tuk home we treated ourselves to a KFC delivery! Well, we had eaten veggie midday, and walked over 5km uphill!  We all took part in the (Bai and Yi minority) Torch Festival yesterday evening - bonfires and torches everywhere, a short firework display and people running around gleefully smearing ashes on strangers' faces! It was a really relaxed and fun event. We loved it.
JD got a lot of attention (foreign faces stand out), proudly holding his burning torch, and got more and more blackened as the evening progressed. Afterwards we got a lift home for well-earned showers.
 Jiajia, JD and I are off to Dali today. It used to take some eight hours to get there by sleeper train, but now this beast can do in two. We are having a fortnight away - our first trip outside Kunming for three years - and JD is keen to relive his last visit here when he and I went horse-riding, cruising on the lake, cable-car up the mountain etc. We are staying in a friend's house while she is away on her holidays, so we can spread out and have a comfortable base to explore from.
 JD and I shared lunch with "Kevin" yesterday. I haven't seen him since he was my student at Robert's School some ten years ago. He is now a fluent English speaker, about to finish his degree in Computing, and debating about which country to do his Masters in! It's amazing to see how so many of the "little kids" I once taught have grown into smart, motivated young men/women!
 Not sure what to make of this. In JD's English class, the students are told to call America, "Star/Stripe" and Britain, "Riceland" - the flag looks like the Chinese character for rice (米). It seems that even writing the names of foreign countries is considered to be an unpatriotic act in modern China? I do wonder how the Chinese government would react if western students started referring to China as "Yellowstar"?
With exams all over and a week of sunshine ahead, we've been hitting the paddle boats on both Green Lake (with some of JD's school friends),and LianHua Lake (with just JD and I).   It's a good way for JD to get some exercise in a controlled area (ie no cars or pedestrians) with fresh air and a cool breeze. The pedals are too close for me to be able to help much (...that's my excuse) so I just let the kids wear themselves out, whilst ensuring they are not about to bump into any boats, ducks or islands! And at 40RMB (£4) an hour, it isn't going to break the bank anytime soon.
 The workmen continue to dig up our neighbourhood, laying lengths of large water run-off pipes. JD is enjoying watching all the digger action, but boy - it ain't 'alf noisy!! We live on the highest of three levels of housing in our neighbourhood. We've noticed the other lower two are about to get their areas dug up, too. But at least that won't be as disruptive for us!   I'm always on the lookout for Chinglish and bad spelling...
 One of my adult students, Sunny [below right], invited me and the family to his son's wedding yesterday. It was quite far away, but he was keen for us to attend, so we went along. There were about 500 people there for a brief ceremony (largely ignored by the audience) and a meal. For many it just seemed an excuse to smoke and get drunk.
The most memorable part of the wedding was the music choices! Beforehand, Black-eyed Peas' "Where is the Love?" was played on repeat! Were they trying to say something? The groom entered to Taylor Swift's "Shake it off", and the bride to David Bowie's "Starman"?! The parents came in to The Carpenters' "Desperado" and the couple left at the end to Oasis's "Don't look back in anger". I kid you not! Irony?  Two of my longest-standing private students finished the final "New Interchange" textbook in the series today, and I gave them both home-made certificates to prove it!
"Wendy" and "Sunny" study English with me for 1½ hours each weekend for fun. Wendy has better pronunciation and listening, while Sunny has better grammar and vocabulary, so they make a good team. And my wife joins them most weeks too, to brush up on her English!
 A dozen workmen (and women) have been digging huge trenches around our neighbourhood roads over the last week. Nobody seems to know why. JD asked one of the workers and he said he thought it was to drain excess water. But we live at the top of a hill and never get any flooding. Jiajia herself declined to ask the workers saying, "It's none of my business."!? There seem to be trucks down the hill carrying large plastic pipes, so it may well be a water thing!   The Secret Forest reopened again yesterday and so, with some trepidation, we went to check out the den. It looked fine from the outside [above], but a check inside showed that the roof had basically collapsed [below]. So, while JD and Jiajia made mud bricks (for reasons I have yet to work out), I spent three hours rebuilding the roof. It's by no means fully repaired yet, but the main beams are back up again and I now have another job added to my holiday list of things to do!
 One of the offending pictures. There's recently been a big storm of controversy in China about some pictures found in a Primary School maths textbook. Parents apparently complained that some the cartoons of the Chinese children were, "ugly, unpatriotic and even pornographic"! Examples included pictures of students having "western wide-set eyes", wearing shirts with (American!?) stars on them and "bulges in boys' trousers"!? Bizarre!  Now this moral panic has spread to all educational institutions. Thus, yesterday, I was summoned to my University to submit all my recently used textbooks for vetting. My boss [right] flicked through the books for pictures of an inappropriate political, cultural or religious flavour. Of course, he found nothing. These are, after all, textbooks produced in China, chosen by the University themselves and which the teachers are forced to use. So they now need to check if they are appropriate? And they don't even have their own copies? It's all very Chinese!!
 After four postponements due to China's zero-COVID policy, the UN had finally lost patience with Kunming and moved the COP15 Biodiversity Conference to Montreal, Canada. Delayed for over two years, the conference will still be run by Chinese officials, but now in a place which doesn't still insist on a 2-week quarantine for those entering the country. Kunming has, for two years, been plastered with signs, displays and slogans proudly displaying the upcoming COP15. So, it's somewhat embarrassing to have finally lost it!
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 AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
June 2022
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