Last week I arrived back in Beijing from a 3 week trip to Yunnan Province on China's southern border. It was a really long trip, but still quite fun, and allowed us to escape the cold weather for a bit. We first flew into Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan. It was in the 70s during the day and 50s at night - almost perfect weather. Kunming is a city of approximately 2 million and reminded me very much of a Chinese Florida. Palm trees lined the roads, flowers were in bloom everywhere, and the street food was delicious. It was surprisingly modern, which seems to be the case with every city I have visited in China with a population of over a million people. Mcdonalds, KFC, and even Best Buy had snuck their ways into the city, and we happily ate our last meal in Kunming at Pizza Hut, before heading into rural Yunnan to stay at a Dai Village for one night. Yunnan is famous for the large variety of ethnic minorities that live within its borders. Among them are Dai, Akha, and Yi. We visited a total of 5 villages, each of which was inhabited by one of these ethnic minorities. China treats the minorities specially, allowing some families to have 2 children. In the last year of high school, each student in China takes an enormous test to qualify them college. The minority students have 20 points added to their scores so that they can more easily be accepted to college. Anyway, at the first village, a group of about 30 lady dancers gave us a traditional Dai dancing performance. We were told that each of their outfits took 2 years to complete. Many of them had been to America to perform even - which is obviously extremely unusual for rural China. They were very hospitable people, and besides having an extremely bad cough that kept me half the night, our stay at the Dai village was pleasant. The pictures are of the Dai dancing ladies, a view of the Dai village, Tulips blooming in Kunming, a sidewalk in a park in Kunming, and a newspaper article in Chinese about Obama that I saw posted on a bulletin board in Kunming. All Chinese people know about Obama, It's very interesting. My host mother even knew his entire family background. That's more than most Americans can say about Hujintao. Most people reading this blog are probably wondering who Hujintao is. I'll post another segment about the trip tomorrow! Toodles.
苏娥俐
