Jinghong

The four days we spent in Jinghong were pretty quiet.  I would go to school with the students in the morning and then have an afternoon free.  One afternoon, I walked over to Manting Park.  At the back of the park is the very important Buddhist temple of Xishuangbanna.

These temples and sites further makes one feel that they are really in Southeast Asia.

Three times a day....an elephant show.  This guy, CLEARLY is a boy.

I am continually impressed with elephants and their intelligence!  (Takes on to know one)

A funny moment!  This guy volunteered for an activity and didn't know that he was going to get a groin massage.  Everyone in the audience busted a gut.

Manting Park must have one of the largest peacock collections anywhere.  The great thing is that one can go and walk around with them.

Our students were followed around like rock stars in town.  George K. was a good sport and was willing to take a picture with these very excited girls.

Our final dinner with our guides.  During each section of the trip, we had local guides to help us through!

Those look like bugs up top and larvae on the bottom, yeah?  You dare me to eat?

Jinghong High School #1

The majority of the last week of our trip to Yunnan was spent in the town of Jinghong, which is the major city of the famed Xishuangbanna region bordering Thailand.  Our students were guests at the Jinghong High School #1. School in China starts at 730AM and there are five 45-minute classes in the morning and lunch at 1210PM.  Afternoon classes starts at 3PM and goes to 530PM (3 classes) and then NIGHT classes from 7PM to 9PM.  Seriously!!

On this day, it is 94 days to the Gaokao!  

Our students teaching students English language words.  English language education in Chinese schools is AWFUL.  First off, the teachers don't speak English well, and they use Chinese in class.  Students simply repeat words out of a book without any context.  Stories from the text are strange and don't make sense.  Grammar is taught without context.  Students have been taking English for five years and know nothing.  The teachers came up to me and asked how it was our students, after six months, could speak Chinese so well.

Jinghong High School #1 is the best school in the area. Students come from all over and live at school, as you can see by the clothes hanging at the dorm in the background.  Here, students are doing exercises.  I love watching it.  They are SO SO SO not into it!

The school asked us English language speaking teachers to teach a class.  I was assigned to teach Riemann sums.  No big, right?  I can pull that off.

I was asked to teach IN CHINESE!!!  Seriously, I pulled off 45 minutes of teaching (and it was filmed!) in Chinese.  Here are the words that I didn't know (the pinyin of course) on my cheat sheet.  It was amazing, by the time the second half of class rolled by, I was in the zone and didn't even realize I was not using English.  I only had my Chinese colleague help me twice.  Proud moment!!!!

Man Luan Le

Another opportunity for a homestay, this time in the Dai village of Man Luan Le.

The Dai are buddhist and Man Luan Le, like most towns have a temple.  It looked like this one was being renovated or replacing an older one.

Here's the man who hosted us teachers.  He and I had an INSTANT "bromance." We are about the same age and for some reason he LATCHED on to me.  One reason, for sure is that he and I were able to understand each other.  When he spoke "putonghua," standard Mandarin, the Beijing Chinese teachers were at a loss, but I was totally able to understand him and vice versa.  Score one for having a "southern" accent!

From what I gathered, my buddy lives mostly on his government money, but he also has income from harvesting some kind of organic material from rivers and lakes and then drying them into a salty dried snack, which is what he's holding here.  It's like dried seaweed.

 

He has three daughters, this one is the youngest.  She wanted to see American money and so I found a kid in the our group who had some with him.  When I returned to Beijing, I sent her some Euros I had lying around the house.

Here is a traditional Dai home.  The living area is on stilts.  The area underneath is for storage.

Here's my buddy's house.  It's modernized, but still has some elements of traditional Dai housing.  The living area is partially enclosed.

But the common areas, such as the dining area, is still open, covered, with no windows.  I slept on a bench in the open area and got to witness a huge lightning storm as well and also heard a long siren at the crack of dawn.

Here's a completely modern Dai house.  The Dai are a relatively prosperous ethnic minority.  They have been blessed with flat and fertile land.  Recently, they have turned to growing bananas, which is an economic boon, but also degrades the soil much faster than traditional crops.

Our students spent the afternoon hanging out with the villagers.  Here's were playing a card game and we taught the kid in the middle how to play. After 15 minutes, without any English language skills, he was beating everyone.  It was at this card game when I first met my buddy.  At the time, I didn't know he was the host of the home at which I was staying.....and you could smell the alcohol emanating from his body!

That evening, we again were treated to a performance of local dance.  My buddy's oldest daughter (20 years old and married to a local boy) was on stage.  Everytime she was on stage I had to point her out or my buddy would get mad at me.

After the show, a fireworks display.

And then a homemade hot air balloon was lit.

The next morning, my buddy bade me goodbye and told me he was off to work to help a village friend build his new house.  I asked to tag along and here's what I saw.  Turns out I misheard what my buddy said.  This was the day they were celebrating a village friend MOVING INTO their new home.

The siren I woke up to was to call signal the villagers to come to the new home and start cooking for a communal meal.  It appeared that the men took care of all meat items. The women, as shown in the picture above, were in charge of all rice and vegetable items.

You want to taste amazing meat?  Organically raised, freshly slaughterd and cooked on a open fire.  The flavors were amazing!

I LOVE this about China, and other developing countries.  It's all about pragmatism.  You need to blend something or stir something?  Just use a drill!

Each time I approached a table, I was handed food.  Seeing this village community come together for a huge meal was great.  It was a special, one of a kind "off the beaten path" experience!

And I have my buddy's phone number in my phone.  He and I will reunite next year when we go back to Man Luan Le.

The Rice Terraces of Yuanyang

An afternoon hiking through the rice terraces of Yuanyang.  I'll let the pictures do the talking!

Everyone in the area knows which terraces belong to which family. However, in this modern day, the government is surveying the land and getting it the information recorded.

The fields are kept flooded in the winter mostly for us tourists.  Planting happens in the early spring and harvest in the fall.

After our hike we drove to the famed Laohuzui lookout.  People, with their major camera gear appeared to have been camped out for hours along the railing to claim their spot.  Why?