I was 6000 feet up in the mountains and staring at the most beautiful stars I have ever seen in my life; far from the pollution and noise of Beijing and high in the mountains of the Hani village, I had a million dollar view. Of course, the reason I was staring at the stars in the first place was because I happened to be sharing a rock-hard mattress with two other girls, which was too big for the tiny room we had been given to sleep in and as a result stuck out the door slightly, so I was basically sleeping out in the open and in the cold, which made it impossible to sleep at all. Thus, the star-gazing.
This was the Yunnan trip. There were so many absolutely incredible sights and experiences, but with these experiences came a near equal amount of challenges as well. While the trip was certainly one of the most incredible ones I've ever taken, it was also one of the most difficult. It was a far cry from the two weeks of hotels and islands of Greece, at least.
The Beijing Center arranges the Yunnan excursion as a highlight of the semester, and while it means two weeks off of classes, it's far from a vacation. We were thoroughly prepped for it via orientation sessions and reading assignments, and we're expected to complete a paper on it now that we're back, so the idea of the trip is really to teach us more about China up-close and personal.
Yunnan is a large province to the southwest of China, and it's home to more than a third of China's ethnic minorities, which we were studying and visiting during the trip. We did home-stays in five minority villages and visited an additional two more for a day apiece. It was a lot of driving and I was beginning to feel like a wandering nomad by the end of it! I'll give an account of the trip over the next few posts.
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| Coming in for a landing! |
Day 1 Kunming
Our trip began in Kunming, known as the City of Eternal Spring because of its warm climate all year round. The beautiful weather was a huge contrast from the cold of Beijing, so we all gained a very favorable impression of Yunnan from the beginning! The city surrounds a lake where thousands of seagulls flock to every winter, and the entire area surrounding the lake is this beautiful park where just about everything was happening, from dancing and singing to elaborate cotton candy art. We passed the day exploring and window shopping, and stayed up late watching a Chinese movie in our hotel. So far so good right? Well the next day we departed for our first village, and things got interesting very quickly...
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| Seagull tourist season |
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| (That umbrella is not for the sun) |
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| The birds would snatch pieces of bread mid-air. |
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The next day, we drove five hours south of Kunming to get to the Yi village. The Yi people are the largest minority in Southwest China. The village we visited was relatively small, and the majority of the people living there were farmers, though in practically every village we visited the majority of the younger people go off to live and work in bigger cities.
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| Welcome to the Yi village |
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The villagers met us as we got off the bus with a big community lunch, after which we were handed off to our host families for the evening and given some time to walk around and explore. And so we explored. As we wandered around the village, we gathered a little parade of followers - young children who liked to call out "hello!" to us and then giggle and run off when we replied. We tripped over chickens and gawked at the giant bulls we saw hanging outside peoples' houses. Later that afternoon, we gathered in the basketball court (the village center) where the Yi village women demonstrated their traditional songs and dances for us and then gave us a chance to try. The Yi people are famous for their traditional "Dragon Dance" which involves the swinging around of a giant dragon.
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| They danced... |
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| And we kinda sorta did something like that. |
Afterwards, we climbed up to eat dinner on the rooftops. In the evening, there was a community party where the villagers did more singing and dancing for us, and then they asked us to perform for them! So we demonstrated our "traditional American dances," namely, the YMCA, Macarena, and Hokey Pokey!
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| A rooftop dinner |
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| I made some friends! |
After the community party, my host family invited myself and the two other girls I was staying with to eat with them, so we sat around a tiny little fire in their home and ate rice cakes dipped in sugar and drank hot water. It turns out the father of the family I was staying with was the head of the village, so we got the VIP treatment.
We slept in our own separate house in the village that night, though none of us really got much sleep thanks to the cold and what we think was a wild pig running around on the first floor...
We left the village the next morning and headed to our next destination, the town of Jianshui.
