Adventures in Kunming and Beyond

Greetings from my not-so-subtropic climate. It’s sad and true. All you have to do is mention Kunming and people instantly rave about the climate and its nickname as the “city of eternal spring.” Well, evidently we’re not having spring this year…because it’s chilly!! Our local paper also determined that this will be an unusually cold winter for Kunming. Winter??? There was not supposed to be a winter in Kunming. Eternal spring, sun and 50-60 degrees was my impression. Anyway, it’s not so much that the cold is a problem as a whole or that it is even that cold. The problem lies in the fact that nowhere is warm! Give me winter in the midwest because at least I could get into my warm car, go into a warm store or be warm at home. Not so here. Because they aren’t used to cold weather that often, there’s no heat. As in, windows don’t seal and you want to put blankets under every door. I do have a small heater that I sit so close to that I’m scared half of my body is going to be tan. And then there’s the fact that it’s been raining and gray for two weeks now. Seriously, this weather is not uplifting. Gone are the glamour days of skirts. My new interest is in long underwear. So, recent efforts and funds have been concentrated on trying to cozy up the apartment. And, to top it off, our water has begun to sporadically turn off, usually in the evening. It doesn’t really bother me, unless I’m attempting to do something with the water, like shower. So lots of layers and occassional lack of hygiene. I’ve never been camping, but China makes up for that, I think.

In other news, some issues with one of the parts of campus I teach for has revealed that Chinese college is more like prison. Let’s just say that students are hunted down if they aren’t in class, teachers are not allowed to use their discretion for anything (such as ending class early) and some reacent incidents have made me pretty thankful for my liberal arts education. I’m not saying I want students to be absent, but really, they’re adults so if they miss, that’s their problem. So anyway, I’m likely going to be deported soon, even though I was not aware of these “rules”. I’ve more or less begged the Foreign Language/English Department to fill my schedule next semester so that I don’t get split between the two and become hated more by the other department that shall remain nameless.

In good news though, I got approval for winter holiday dates so plane tickets and hotels can now be booked! I was in negotiation with all of this since first, school break schedules appear to be unheard of and the fact that I have two departments’ finals schedules to work around. One of them starts finals in late December and the other doesn’t start until mid-January, in addition to conflicts on the school start date for the next semester. But, I have the go-ahead, so school will just have to start without me if that’s the case

But yes, there were some days when I wanted to jump off it!

So, no posts and MIA. What’s the story? Well, the last week of September we had a double week of classes to make up for the ones that we wouldn’t have during the October holiday. Not cool. Anyway, so in the midst of the double week, I was also signed up to judge my department’s CCTV speech contest, get my contestants ready for it, hostess another university’s CCTV competition and go to the next level of my school’s competition to watch my students. CRAZY! It was fun for the most part. I enjoyed being able to be involved in so many aspects of the competition, but I’m pretty sick of hearing about global citizenship (the speech topic). Anyway, so I made it through the crazy week, which included teaching on the weekend…booo. (On a sidenote: I tried to let my Sunday morning class leave early, well, pretty much when we got there, and we got caught!! AND, then we got put under classroom arrest, with some woman standing outside the door until I shut it in her face. CRAZY!! There are days when I wonder why I haven’t been deported!!)

Anyway, so last week (first week of Oct.) we had vacation. We just chilled on Monday after the killer week. Due to a complicated story involving the Foreign Office and a plane ticket, I owed them a good chunk of my first pay check, so exotic travel was a little out of budget (bummer). Oh well. We still had a good time doing some touring around Kunming. On Tuesday we went to a park called Black Dragon Pool. It was in the mountains (which was quite the escapade trying to get there), so it was fun to do some hiking and actually see some trees changing color. I miss Fall! Then on Wednesday, one of our students and her friends took us to a park about an hour away called the Yunnan Nationalities/Minorities Park. Our province has at least 26 minorities, so this place was kind of like the EPCOT of China. Each minority has a little settlement with stuff from their culture. Of course, being minorities ourselves, people were quite amused by our presence. It turned out to be a good thing that we didn’t get to travel far because then I came down with a cold/virus of some sort for the rest of break. Not fun, but better than having it for teaching.

So, that means that we’ve gotten through another week of teaching. We are battling massive amounts of rain and thunderstorms this week, so that’s a bummer, too.

Those are pretty much the highlights of the last few weeks, well the condensed version