This will be a short post since I have overwhelming amounts of homework. After we left the village in the last post, we headed to quite a few other really small towns and villages. There was a four day period where nearly all we did was hike 5-7 hours per day up and down terraced rice fields (i'll include a picture), and that was mildly unpleasant because of the heat (in the 80s everyday). On one of our last days of hiking we ended up at a place overlooking nothing but terraced fields (which, because it is winter, are currently flooded with water) and mountains. It may have been the best view I have ever seen, but unfortunately that happened to be the one day I left my camera on the bus. Stupid me.
I forgot to mention that right leaving Kunming we explored a small town where I saw two women with their feet bound. In 9th grade World Civilizations I was taught that there was no one alive today with bound feet, so I asked my Chinese history teacher about it, and she said that although foot binding was banned in the early 1900s, the practice still went on until Mao laid the smack-down on it in the early 1950s. I found that very interesting and almost didn't believe that I was looking at bound feet at first.
Skipping ahead... in the beginning of our last week in Yunnan we rafted down the Mekong River, which made my mother very nervous even though I assured her we were A. Not in Vietnam and B. Not anywhere near the Mekong Delta and C. Not living during the time of the Vietnam War. The rafting was fun, and we got to have "water wars" with the other boats. The sun was shining, a few clouds in the sky, and the temperature was in the low 80s. A perfect day.
We got out of the river at a small village and spent the night. That night I got up in front of the whole village and told a joke in Chinese, which was pretty nerve racking. But I survived. We stayed three more nights in villages (you can only imagine how disgustingly dirty we all were, since we didn't shower for 4 days), and then returned to the capital of the southern most prefecture in Yunnan, Xishuangbanna. The capital's name is Jinghong. It was a sizable town (big enough to have an airport, but not big enough to have a Mcdonalds), and we stayed there during the next five nights. During the daytime, we went to school with Chinese students at the Jinghong Number 1 Highschool. This was by far the my experience on the trip, but i'll have to save that for my next post. Until then... bye bye.
苏娥俐
p.s. 1st pic: a chinese teacher and me writing my joke. boys in the background playing basketball with the locals (who all love basketball).
2nd pic: rafting on the Mekong
3rd pic: terraced rice fields through fog
4th pic: chilling with the local children
5th: a gramma with bound feet: proof that 9th grade world civ has failed me.
