Jiajia and I were chatting to a car salesman the other day and picking up glossy brochures. We have no intention of buying a new car but their salesroom car park is very close to the second-hand furniture market and we wanted somewhere free to park! Also nearby is this huge "Transformers" landmark. It actually points towards our home, and we wondered if he was admonishing us for blagging our parking space - "Lesson learned, Optimus Prime!"
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At the end of November last year I blogged about a deer and a ram who had fallen in love in a Kunming Zoo. Well apparently they are getting married today (it being Valentine's Day). Over five hundred people are paying $10 each to go and watch, and the animals will be dressed up in wedding clothes for the occasion! Cue the corny puns, I fear... "Doe you pramise to stay together, no ifs no butts....?" "I wool" ....etc A dozen teenage volunteers arrived in Kunming yesterday doing a "gap year" 6 months with the charity, Lattitude. My job is to train them to be English teachers in 8 days. They're a lively and positive bunch and, as usual, I'm really enjoying training them. This time we are based at a smaller downtown branch of my school as it's been newly renovated and is 2 minutes walk from their hotel. It also has a shower, which is a blessing as we're now 6 days without running water at home. Our neighbourhood actually appeared on the local news today to illustrate how bad the drought here is (not that the rest of Kunming seems to be affected at all). I'm a regular reader of, (and sometimes contributor to) the website GoKunming which is the main online source of information for foreigners in Kunming. This week, amongst the news and local reports, there was a lovely piece of prose by Colin Flahive, which lyrically summed up his experiences and memories of life there. Having spent many years in rural China myself, it really struck a chord. He kindly agreed to let me repost it here: Ode to the Countryside
Where meals pull families back together each evening and there's always extra just in case someone else happens by. Where your back is always sore from sitting on hard little chairs while cracking open handfuls of sunflower seeds and sipping on endless cups of strong tea. Where a pig somehow feeds an entire family for a year with sausage and salted pork and where even yak butter tea can be refreshing. Where every cigarette you refuse plants a seed of distrust and where they won't let you leave until you eat just one more meal. Where they cook for the pigs before cooking for the family. Where somehow cats befriend dogs, dogs befriend ducks and ducks befriend chickens, while cows and buffalo stand around seemingly stupefied by it all. Where the idea that dogs can't eat chicken bones is laughable. Where the proud clucks of a hen that just laid an egg don't go unnoticed by the owner. Where wearing high heels or a business suit is no reason to stay out of the rice paddies. Where children don't practice the violin for five hours a day and the term 'tiger mom' means nothing more than the mother of a tiger. Where the only traffic is a herd of goats and the only honks are from geese. Where the ability to chat is an art form and "privacy" is a foreign concept. Where you can't help but feel like a wimp when you notice how worn everyone else's hands are and how manicured yours look. Where everything you eat was raised or grown just a short walk away and even the corn cobs don't go to waste. Where a walk to the neighbors' house might take a couple hours. Where fire still stokes the embers of life for cooking, heating, disposing, fertilizing and as the vehicle to fill the wallets of passed relatives. Where even with barking dogs, clanging cow bells, early rooster calls and roaring tractor motors you somehow sleep sounder than you have in a long time. Where you can still find your way by the light of the moon and the Milky Way spans the entire sky. Apparently I'm allowed to show you a photo of my peeling leg, but banned from showing you Jiajia's peeling back, with bikini-shaped white patches. Strange that. Kunming has been having some lovely sunny days recently. We're still technically in Winter, but our solar-heated water is reaching temperatures of 60-70ºC each day without any help from the back-up electricity heater which makes for a hot shower. Mind you, that doesn't stop one of our household (let's call her "M-in-L") from boiling up a kettle of water each evening for her strip wash. Some habits die hard. With Jiajia in Shenzhen, Ma-in-law visiting the hospital to dance (don't ask!), no lessons, and a cold, rainy day I decided to visit the "Kunming Zoological Museum". It's something I've been meaning to do since spotting it from a bus some weeks ago. A smiley guard ushered me into the lobby and called over a curator who told me (in English, no less) that the museum was closed but, as it was only me and as it was raining, she would let me wander around anyway. The first exhibit [see above] made me smile. A dinosaur surrounded by seemingly unconcerned stuffed dogs. But better was to come [see below]. A collection of dogs surrounding a sneaky crocodile, perhaps eyeing them up for lunch! Most of the museum was less bizarre, however - a range of dinosaur bones and various pinned, stuffed and pickled animals. It was definitely worth an hour of my time though, and I promised the kindly English-speaking curator that I would look into the possibility of bringing some of our schools' students there for a guided tour in English sometime.
Can you guess what the man on the left is doing? If you are a Kunming resident, you might well recognise a collector of "gutter oil". These secretive and unscrupulous characters scrape off large quantities of waste oil residue which has built up on the sewer walls. They take it away, boil it up to remove any obvious impurities and then sell it back to restaurants to reuse as cooking oil. Gross, right? There's been quite a furore about it recently, with many foreigners being put off using small restaurants altogether for fear that they are cooking with the stuff. Some restaurants even have signs up assuring customers that they use decent cooking oil. The authorities are trying to clamp down on it, but with limited success so far. Gutter try harder, guys! Big news here in Kunming at the moment is the blossoming romance between a sheep and a deer at the nearby animal park!? They have recently been spotted kissing, canoodling (and more!). There is now an online vote as to whether they should be separated, or left to themselves. It's nice to see any sort of voting in China, to be honest! The city of Kunming has finally hit the international news scene. Hooray! American ABC news, Al Jazeera and even the BBC have reported the story of three fake Apple Storses, recently discovered in the city. Despite looking almost identical to real Apple Stores, some small details gave away the deception (such as the shop calling itself "Apple Store" - real Apple outlets just have the logo). Even the poor staff working there were convinced they were employees of Apple. Apple Inc has confirmed they have no official stores in Kunming, and are looking into these fake ones. Nice to know Kunming is famous for something! No prizes for guessing which Hollywood movie was playing in this cinema until recently! Life-size cut-outs... loving that!
This driver was videod in Kunming yesterday, and the footage was shown on TV today. Frustrated at being stuck in a traffic jam and with nowhere to do a U-turn, he casually decides to drive up the steps of a footbridge, over the road and back down the other side onto the opposite carriage! Pedestrians can be seen looking on in amazed disbelief before diving out of the way. Love it! This is the guy who kept me up last night. Cars had double-parked all down my road, causing traffic gridlock, while beams of light swept into the sky from the nearby stadium. Yes, the "world famous" (in China!) Hong Kong singer and actor, Jacky Cheung, was performing a rare Kunming concert. His insipid warbling and crooning could be heard easily from my kitchen, as could the cheers and roars of a packed crowd. Ava is a big fan (her mobile plays one of his songs), but couldn't justify the 2000RMB (£200) for a ticket. She could have sat by my fridge and sung along! By 11.30pm the gig was over followed by thousands of people streaming out of the stadium, shouting, singing and honking their horns. Peace has resumed this morning, thankfully! More UFO activity reported in the outskirts of Kunming with three black dots hovering above the Songhua dam (the largest one circled here). The man who took the photo is reported as saying, "In the photo it looks like a butterfly", so I'm wondering if it was, perhaps, just a butterfly! However Zhang Yifang, the President of the Kunming UFO Research Society (yes, there is one) is quoted as saying, "It has the saucer-like shape of a UFO. I believe it is a UFO". So I guess it must be true! We don't see a lot of wildlife here in the city, beyond the odd caged bird. But the other day, two Kunming garage workers got a bit of a shock when a two metre long king cobra slithered across the road in front of them as they drove home. Amazingly, they managed to catch the endangered animal and called the Yunnan Provincial Wildlife Center, who picked it up the next day. Rather them than me! I snapped this odd picture the other day. The man was building a wall and adding the last of the bricks to the top, but whilst standing on a plank of wood that seemingly had no supports. Was he really just floating there? David Blaine, eat your heart out"!
You start to believe that Kunming is no longer a "poor Chinese city" when you see someone pulling up to the city's first, and newly opened, Starbucks in a stretch limousine [see photo]. But then, seconds later, you spot an old and filthy lady carrying a 2m high pile of rubbish on the back of her tricycle. It's certainly a place of vivid contrasts. At least my school tries its best to balance these extremes a little; charging high prices for "VIP one-to-one lessons" to those that can afford it, whilst offering free training to English teachers in poor schools on the outskirts of the city.
JIajia and I went to see a temporary exhibition of works by the famous Chinese painter Pan Yu Liang today [see self portrait above]. She is considered to be the first female painter to combine traditional Chinese and western painting techniques. As a result, she was promptly kicked out of China and spent much of her life in Paris. Luckily for me, Jiajia herself is a very knowledgeable art graduate and was able to point out the different painting techniques and subject influences in the paintings, helping to bring the pictures to life for me. I really liked half a dozen but, with 80% of them being female nudes, they did start to look a bit samey after a while! A nice trip out, though. I'd say I have a happy life here in Kunming, but harmonious? Hmmm... The never-ending noise really gets on my nerves at times. For example, the two chemist shops over the road from my flat who seem to compete with each other using automatic megaphones to blast out their latest deals, over and over again. More than once I've gone across and simply disconnected their machines, shouting at the owner that I can't sleep, work or hear my TV! It's most unlike me to be so aggressive! They usually turn the speakers back on after I've left, though often at a lower volume for a while at least. And the other day, the blare from the shops was joined by a placard-waving shop assistants parading down the street to advertise some deal or other [see photo]. Strangely, a lot of Chinese people I've spoken to about this say they really enjoy the noise, the hustle, the bustle and the packed crowds, saying it's all part of an "exciting shoppping experience". Must be just me then! "Chengguan" is the rather more succinct Chinese name for what translates as the "City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau Officers". Their role is to ensure that local city laws are adhered to. They have a very poor reputation amongst Chinese residents however, allegedly prone to heavy-handedness and over-reaction, though I've also read reports of locals ganging up to attack Chengguan officers who they thought were abusing their power. I saw this for myself for the first time the other day. From the safety of a passing bus, I watched a noisy scene with a lady flailing about and screaming as her little food cart was ripped from her and thrown into the back of a truck. There's no doubt she was an "unlicensed vendor" and the Chenguan were therefore doing their job. However, it was hard not to feel moved by her weeping, as she saw her livelihood destroyed before her eyes. What annoys me is that there is a street nearby which, every evening, has middle-class young people selling clothes from the back of their cars. This adhoc market blocks the road, creates a terrible noise for residents and really annoys the legitimate shop owners who pay high rents and whose pavements then get parked on with "mobile shops". And yet there's no sign of the Chengguan intervening there. Maybe they prefer picking on poor, vulnerable women? Ava and I visited the Kunming Train Museum today (the deal was, "trawl around two furniture stores and you can play on the trains!"). The little museum was full of old pictures of Kunming and other towns (how things have changed on 100 years), plus a large shed nearby was stuffed with old locomotives. They were great for clambering on and reliving childhood fantasies! Definitely worth the £1 entrance ticket.
There were packs of countryside folk roaming the streets this morning, painting the bottoms of all the trees in Kunming white. I've seen this before in China but have never been able to find the reason for it all. Some Chinese friends say it's to keep the trees warm in the Winter (but then why stop painting so low?), while others say it's to prevent insects climbing the trees (but then why paint them in the Winter when there are no insects around?). When I lived in the countryside, I was told it was to help the cars see the edge of the road at night, but that can't be true in the well-lit city here? Presumably someone pays for it, so there must be a reason? My Chinese teacher, Cathy, has said she'll ask around and see if anyone has any idea why this happens every year. I went to a very interesting (and free) exhibition in Kunming today, covering the geography, flora and fauna of Northwest Yunnan using about a hundred large photographs, amazingly with English translations. Equally fascinating (to me, at least) were the examples of typical Kunming folk "on display". Two giggling schoolgirls taking photos of the photos with their mobile phones. A very old and smiley guy loitering near one of the pictures, ready to share some story or background about it to anyone coming too close (I escaped with the universal hand gesture for "I don't understand"). Then there were two chefs in aprons and tall white hats, presumably on a lunch break, munching snacks as they wandered around. And a studious-looking guy noting down all the animal information in a small notebook, whilst clearing his throat and spitting on the floor at 30 second intervals (I timed him). As well as the photos, there were the usual amusing examples of Chinglish. One frog was said to have "a worrisome habitat due to over-catch" and a picture of assorted bugs was entitled "Some inspects shot without intension". My favourite, I think, was this monkey photo with a sign that explained, "Deep love. The growth history of each child is a history of hardness of his/her mother. There is no exception". When developers want to build (yet another) high-rise estate in Kunming they must first buy up the existing small, old houses in order to clear the land for the new build. But, just occasionally, they come across someone who simply doesn't want to move, often objecting to the rock bottom price being offered for their land. Whilst the houses all around are rapidly destroyed, these so-called "nail houses" remain stubbornly defiant, delaying the whole project. This one [see photo] has gained some notoriety. The frustrated developers recently built a trench around it to cut off the electricity and plumbing, and then filled it with water to reduce the occupant's movements. And now there have been reports of shots being fired into the building. Hang in there, nail! High excitement here at the moment with the grand opening - just 5 minutes walk from my flat - of the "2010 Winter Clothing, Kunming Characteristics Snacks Exposition". Where else, in the same huge venue, could you see the latest in knitwear and kit-kats, pullovers and popcorn, sweaters and sweeties. It's a new must-see on the Kunming tourist trail, for sure! |
AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
May 2024
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