民族村 ("min zu cun", the Yunnan Ethnic Minorities Park)

I visited the Ethnic Minorities Park near Kunming.  It was very interesting.  There are about 25 minority groups in the Yunnan Province, and they have built a park with replica villages from each group, illustrating their customs etc and even letting you try some of their local food.  I felt like I was in "full tourist mode", since the park had a very "Disney" feel to it.  There were a lot of kids in ethnic costumes in each "village", and I couldn't tell if they were actual ethnic minorities or not, or just kids from Kunming working a summer job.  There were even replica portions of Lijiang and Dali.  These are two towns that I crossed off my itinerary because I read that they had become overly commercialized and touristy, so I felt very ironic visiting their replicas in a tourist park near Kunming.

Here are some photos of the villages.

Entering the park.  The villages were built around these man-made lakes, the whole park was really quite peaceful and beautiful.  It was a weekday so not crowded at all, but I felt it might have been more interesting with more visitors.  At a lot of the visitors the "cast" were just sitting around chatting or texting on their phones, and a lot of the times I was the only visitor in the "village".

A lot of the Buddhist temples were covered in wind chimes like these.  It was very nice but I'd hate to have a temple like this for a neighbour!

Not Tibetan, but similar with the prayer flags.

A couple of the local delicacies - rice steamed in bamboo, and some kind of skewered meat.  I also had deep fried milk tofu from Dali, which you can learn about on the "Bite of China" series I mentioned in an earlier post.

Fake Mongolia.  Or rather, fake Mongolian-like village.  One of the ethnic groups settled in this area many years ago when the Mongolians invaded, and then decided to stay.

I don't recall the group.  See the mountains in the background?  They are on the opposite shore of Lake Dianchi, which is the largest lake in Yunnan Province, and is supposed to be very beautiful.  The ethnic park is "not quite" on the shore of the lake.  In fact, you can't get to Lake Dianchi at all unless you purchase one of the luxury condominiums that is built along the entire of it's shorefront.

I was watching one of the performances when this group of girls sat down in front of me and popped up their umbrellas.  Typical behaviour here.

Yes, this is the Chinese character for alcohol!

One of the houses was constructed of these boards, carved with faces.  Very cool.

Not fake Lhasa (which is in a different province), but fake Tibetan Temple (there are Tibetan villages in many places outside of Tibet, including Yunnan).  However when I tried to take a picture inside a fake monk yelled at me, "No photos!"  Too bad, because this was the coolest of all fake buildings in the entire park, very colourful and a spectacular recreation.

Tea is one of the main industries of Yunnan.  I stopped in a tea shop near the park, and experienced the "hard sell" (which involved a young lady making me some free tea).  It was quite interesting, and something I need to learn more about.  The tea leaves come in these compressed bricks, that look kind of like discs (or maybe fancy blocks of hash), and she chopped off a couple of hunks with an ice pick.  She then poured hot water over the leaves (as you can see above, hot water was splashing everywhere) and she then decanted the tea into teapots for serving.  As you can see above she had two pots on the go for me.  Needless to say I bought some of their gift packs (what a sucker) but intend to buy more once I learn a bit more about it.  The "blocks" of tea leaves were marked with the different varieties and the date, some were as old as 2007 or 2006.

 

I decided to go "Thai" for dinner that night.  I had some vegetables and fish, which unfortunately arrived separately (so much for Chinese efficiency) but it was all very good!  The area that my hostel is in seems to be the area that most of the foreigners hang out, so a lot of the restaurants (like this one) are kind of pricey, and this dinner cut into my G&T budget, but it was delicious and well worth it!

(For comparison, for lunch today I had a couple of baozi (steamed buns with meat) for 4 RMB, outside of the tourist zone.  This dinner cost 96 RMB.)

Getting sick overseas

As I mentioned I got a tooth ache a few days ago.  I waited patiently hoping it would go away but it's only been getting worse.  So I googled and asked around and found a good bilingual dentist close to my hostel.  (Actually there are at least 2 good bilingual dentists nearby.  I guess there's a market for foreigners with tooth problems.)  So I walked over this morning for their 9AM opening, hoping they could squeeze in a drop-in.

It was a very modern clinic (with the exception that they have both "private" and "non-private" chairs - "non-private" are basically a row of chairs with people getting cleanings and checkups etc) and apparently the 2 dentists are trained in either North America or Europe.  The dentist poked my teeth and gums ("Ouch!  Yep that's the one.") and then took an x-ray, and determined that everything looked ok.  I had either bumped my tooth or bitten down too hard on something.  The x-ray looked normal.  good news - no problem.  Bad news - nothing they can do about it!  I just have to put up with the pain until it goes away.  They even let me keep the x-ray for a souvenir:

The whole visit took about 15 minutes and they charged me 15 RMB.  That's about $2.50 but no problem, I've got travel insurance so I can make a claim when I get home.

Getting sick overseas is no fun!  It puts a damper on the whole holiday experience, and it's much more difficult to deal with.  I *might* have been able to deal with the dentist in Chinese, but how to translate technical terms like "crown" and "root canal"?  Also I brought a small supply of advil and tylenol but I'm rapidly running through it, and it's very difficult to come by this kind of medicine over here.  I'm going to have to save my supplies for night time and put up with the pain during the day, unfortunately :-(

A note for anyone thinking of coming to China:

- Bring lots of advil and tylenol (if you don't need it I'll take it off your hands!)
- Bring lots of dental floss - this is something else I haven't been able to find here, fortunately I brought enough for my whole trip.

Where in the world am I?

I've been asked by a good friend to provide a map, so here it is:

My travel so far has been:

- Beijing, 3 weeks
- travel from Beijing to Luoyang by fast train
- Luoyang, 3 days
- travel from Luoyang to Dengfeng by bus
- Dengfeng, 6 days
- travel from Dengfeng to Xi'An by bus and train
- Xi'An, 3 weeks
- fly from Xi'An to Kunming

I'm in Kunming for 2 weeks altogether, after which I fly to Guilin for 2 weeks (where I'm doing a home stay with a Chinese family), then 4 days back in Beijing and then fly home to Canada.

I met an interesting guy in the hostel bar today who has a blog with a built-in map (check out http://www.travelpod.com/z/richard.wolters/1/1369737328 - he gets extra friend points for referring to me as a 45 year old traveler) and now I'm obsessed with getting Google Maps properly integrated into my Google blog.  You wouldn't think it would be hard but this exercise is worth a whole blog post all on its own!

It wasnt such a bad day after all

First of all here is my lunch that I wrote about in a previous post:

Doesn't it look appetizing?  It was served this way, a bowl of broth with some chicken scraps and a few onions, and a bowl of noodles showed up later.  Definitely the low point of my day.  (Amazing how much of my mood on this holiday revolves around food.)

Later for dinner I went to the Camel Bar.  I googled Kunming and read about this bar, which has been around awhile and become something of an institution.  (Long enough to accumulate a few negative reviews - like overpriced beer and sub-standard food.)  Nevertheless, today hamburgers were on sale and I had a hankering for a hamburger.  However when I arrived I found a whole section on the menu with Yunnan local specialties.  I picked a spicy beef cooked with hot peppers and sour pickled vegetables, yum!  And fiery hot.

They had a number of beers on the menu so for desert I had a Delerium Tremens:

This post is hereby dedicated to my brother-in-law Marc, I know he would approve of this restaurant (and could tell me if they were serving my Delerium Tremens in the correct glass).  Fiery hot food and an excellent selection of beer from all over the world (including a few from Quebec).

Gan bei!

I guess it wasn't such a bad day after all.

PS  A few pics of Kunming lit up at night:

在飞机场，一次冒险 (An adventure at the airport)

(This one is for my Mom, who reads my blog to her computer class every week.  The rest of you can use Google Translate!)

几天前我从西安坐飞机到昆明。我发现西安的飞机场比较小。我觉得大部分的中国人坐火车。比较便宜，但是比较慢！

中国的办理登机手续比加拿大的一样。飞机票，护照，安检，等等。不一样是中国人不喜欢排队，所以上了飞机一点儿混乱。

我方我的行李在爱克斯光机（X-ray machine）然后问题！

安检员问我：“你有刀子吗？”

我告诉她  ”没有。“

我打开我的包袋然后－恐怕！包袋里有刀子。

我说：”是很小的，用它削了铅笔。“

她告诉我：”没关系，还不可以带在飞机。“

然后安检员拿走我的非常小的刀子。

这是我的冒险！

Overall "not good day" in Kunming

This post may seem a bit whiny, but not every day can be full of fun and adventures.  I'm here in China for three months (7+ weeks down and exactly one month to go) and so there are bound to be some bad days.

I've been at this hostel for two nights now and hardly slept a wink.  It's very loud at night due to close proximity to bars and such.  The hostel provides earplugs and they help, but I have trouble falling asleep and then get woken up periodically during the night.  On top of this I've developed quite a bad toothache.  I don't think there's a specific problem, other than - since I didn't take care of my teeth teeth properly when I was younger, they're extra sensitive now, and when I don't get enough sleep I also grind my teeth, and this makes my teeth more sensitive to just about everything.  Let this be a lesson to all the young folks out there - take care of your teeth!  Or else when you're my age, travelling for three months in China, you'll get a bad toothache in Kunming and then you'll regret your misspent youth of not flossing every night.

Breakfast this morning was ok - French toast and fruit salad.  They seem to like French toast with jam here in China, although here they have the option of chocolate sauce, which I'll try next time.  I wandered over to the Chinese school I arranged for Kunming, but the person I'd been emailing wasn't there, and no one else was aware of me.  I left my number and email but haven't heard anything back yet.  (It is now late in the afternoon.)  I hung out at a Starbucks for awhile (my first visit to "星吧克" since landing in China) and had a Green Tea Latte (which was awful! - "抹茶拿铁" - the first two characters means Green Tea Powder, which is Japanese and awful - don't get this drink!) then went back to my hostel and had a nap.

In the afternoon I took my passport into the Foreign Affairs Office of the local police to get my Visa extended for an extra month (my original visa was only 60 days).  I've heard that in Kunming this can be a bit bureaucratic, so I left lots of time, however it only took about 20 minutes to get through all the paperwork.  Of course I now have to wait a whole week to get my passport back, with my new visa.  I don't know what this means in terms of what I can do or not in the next week (for example if there are tours that need to see my passport), hopefully hopefully I won't have any issues.

Afterwards I was hungry so I stopped my the first restaurant I found for a late lunch. I ordered a kind of chicken noodle soup, and it was awful.  The "chicken" was basically "chicken ends" with very little meat on the bones.  I wasn't sure if they accidentally gave me the bones from the stock.  And the noodles were too hot for my sore tooth.  But I choked it down and then headed back to my hostel.

I'm now testing a scientific theory - I'm having problems with sleeping and with my teeth because I'm drinking too much beer and not enough gin & tonics.  So far (I've finished one G&T and ordered my second - for science!) it seems to be working.

I hope my Kunming Chinese school calls.  But in the meantime I'll teach myself some new words by doing more blogging in Chinese.  And if I make more grammar mistakes than usual, you can just blame it on the gin & tonics!

干杯！ ("Gan bei!"  This is how you toast in Chinese.  It basically means "Bottoms up!")

Kunming (and food, of course)

Today (Sunday, my first full day in Kunming) I decided to chill and take it easy.  Due to the handy location of my hostel downtown, it is also close to all the bars, and therefore very noisy at night.  I was suspicious when they advertised "free earplugs" as one of the perks, and there were already a few sets in the room when I moved in.

After a nice lay in I walked down to "Green Lake Park", which is very beautiful, very green, and has a large lake.  Hence the name!

There were all kinds of activities going on all around the park - dancing, bands, drums - this troupe of little girls was the cutest.

I wandered around town in the scorching heat (it rained yesterday and last night but cleared up by noon) and took pictures of some building for all you architecture fans out there.

Chinese architecture is really quite spectacular.  These pictures don't do it justice at all.

And now Food, of course:

Last night I had Crossing the Bridge Noodles ("过桥米线"), the most famous local dish in all of Kunming.  It is served as a bowl of broth (with a thin film of oil to keep it warm) and a bunch of ingredients, which you mix yourself.

I had a version of this in Beijing, but it wasn't as good.  In fact here is a conversation I had with a fellow in Greek Lake Park this afternoon:

"You should try Crossing  Bridge Noodles."
"I did!  I had it for dinner last night.  In fact I had it when I was in Beijing."
"In Beijing it is not as good!"
"Yes I agree completely!"

Before I went  a walk in the park I dropped into a small noodle shop.  I picked it because the food looked good and the menu looked simple (am I a lazy tourist or what):

The two kids were staring at me the whole time I was eating.  The girl would keep telling  brother "Don't stare," but then they both kept staring.

It was another "do it yourself" meal.  The cooks would assemble a bowl of soup, noodles and beef, and there was a counter where you could add your own onions, mint, hot sauce etc.

I added a touch too much hot sauce but it was sooooo gooooooooddddddd!!!!!  Yum.

Arrival in Kunming (and postscript on Chinese Technology)

When I left Xi'An this morning it was raining, and I think I brought the weather with me.  It was overcast when I arrived at my hostel, so I picked up my free welcome beer (!) and sat out on the rooftop patio, at which point it immediately started pouring rain!

When I arrived at the Kunming airport I asked the lady at the information desk what is the best way to get to my hostel, and she said something like "taxi over here ... something something go downstairs something else," so I just punted and went for a taxi.  As we were driving into town I saw a high-speed LRT that looked like it might go to the airport, so I'll have to look into that for my exit.  We were on meter and the cabbie made me pay the toll fare (10 RMB), not sure if I was getting scammed or not? On the way to the Xi'An airport (which was MUCH smaller than I expected for a city of 6 or 7 or 8 million) the cabbie paid the tolls, but I was on a flat fee ...

Postscript on technology over here - I observe that everything here is based on an immense amount of manual labour.  And the technology doesn't seem to be in an effort to replace people, just to streamline the process and make things more efficient.  Two interesting pieces of technology that I've mentioned - the little "cell phone like gadgets" that the servers use to fax orders back to the kitchen, and the "prepaid" cards at some food courts and at the night market in Dengfeng.  (If you don't recall this one, you buy a card for 50 or 100 RMB, and then when you buy food at the different marts, they just "tap" the card and the proper amount gets deducted.) These make things run incredibly efficiently, and you gain  huge amount of respect for just how quickly and efficiently things get done.  Everything I see or read about ow things are done over here involves a huge amount of people and manual labour, but the processes are all streamlined and efficient.

Even "QQ" and "Weixin" - sitting down and logging onto a computer takes FOREVER and it's much easier to just pop out your cell phone and chat with whoever.  You can even do it when you're just standing around bored at work :-)

Well it seems to have stopped raining in Kunming.  So, should I go for  walk, or order another beer and enjoy the patio?  Tough decisions when you're on holiday ...

PS  Check out the cabbies filling up in Xi'An.  Crazy ...

A "good" day in Chinese (so far)

My Chinese teacher Valarie met me at my hostel this morning to see me off.  We chatted for about ah hour in (mostly) Chinese and she told me my Chinese has improved a lot on this trip!  She can chat to me at pretty  much regular speed, whereas she used to have to talk very slowly and repeat herself more often.

I also had a (sort of) chat with the cab driver on the way to the airport (which took about an hour).  I understood most of what he asked me, and my little Pleco translator came in very handly!  For example he asked my if Canada was very "fuyu", so I punched in "fuyu" and came up with "富裕" - "well off" or "prosperous".  I told him yes but also very expensive!

At one point he asked me "... jia ... ren ..." and I know "jia ren" is "family", so I told him I have 2 kids.  He laughed and said "no, no" and I finally understood that he was asking " ... jia yuan ... ren min bi ..." - or, how many Canadian dollars ("jia yuan") per Chinese RMB ("ren min bi").

Slowly I um understanding this language!!!

I got caught trying to smuggle a knife on board the plane (it is a small knife I carry to sharpen pencils, I had forgotten about it).  Luckily I looked harmless so they just laughed at me and confiscated it.  I think it's because I've said nice things about China on my blog :-)

It's raining today so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my flight won't be delayed!

Dealing with Technology over here

The biggest problem I've had in China has been getting a decent Internet connection.  I've talked to other students/travelers and it's been a pretty consistent story.  You read a lot in the news about pollution, air and water quality etc, but a flaky Internet is what drives me crazy every single day.

This week my Chinese teacher assigned me some very interesting homework.  One of the things I've asked her to focus on in class is Reading a Menu, so we've been covering a lot of the most common characters that appear in a Chinese menu.  (As an aside, when I mentioned that it's difficult for me to understand what I'm ordering, she said that Chinese people have the same problem!  There are some common dishes, but most of the time the restaurant names a dish whatever they want, without a hint to the ingredients or cooking method.  So my problems are no different than anyone else's.)  As homework she told me to watch the documentary series "A Bite of China", which talks about a lot of the local dishes around China, and some of the history behind them.  I found the series on YouTube (which is blocked in China by the way) in Chinese with English subtitles (perfect for me to practice my listening skills), but due to a crappy connection it took me almost 2 1/2 hours to watch a 50-minute episode!  How frustrating.  There are 7 episodes altogether.

(By the way you should all watch this series.  Here is the link to the English version: "http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/879149".)

A bit of an aside on some of my technology adventures on this trip.

As I mentioned Internet connectivity is  big issue.  Related to that is dealing with the Great Firewall of China.  Many sites are blocked including Blogspot (my blog), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (my Chinese homework), and from day to day various international news sites may be blocked or not.  Sometimes google.ca is blocked and sometimes not.  Most Chinese people seem to deal with this by not bothering with any of the blocked sites - there are Chinese equivalents to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - and in fact most of the technology they use seems to be based on their mobile phones rather than computers anyways (more on that later).

I bought a new ASUS tablet for my trip, which turned out to be a pretty good choice.  It's got a keyboard docking station which is handy for typing these long blog posts and emails.  (One of my classmates in Beijing had a similar tablet with no keyboard and she spent hours and hours typing emails.  Trying to type on a touch-screen really sucks.)  However I still haven't found decent apps for managing my photos and editing my blog.  The apps I've tried (via Google Play) have all sucked pretty badly so I'm relying on some of the built-in apps for photo editing and blog writing.  I really should have figured this stuff out before I left, trying to deal with things like this in a foreign country with bad Internet is not easy!

A couple of useful things I have picked up though:  I use the Astrill VPN service to bypass GFC.  Most of my classmates in Beijing use this service, and it seems to work most of the time.  Sometimes it gets blocked but they have many servers and I can usually find one that works.  Here in Xi'An I had problems even with the VPN, and I had to jump through a few hoops to configure my computer to use some of Google's public services (DNS for the techies out there) instead of the local Internet provider's.  As a result *most of the time* I can get access to my blog and international news, even if the stability of the connection is a bit flaky.  I'm not sure if any of this would have been easier if I'd just bought a standard Windows laptop ...

(Another aside:  My VPN quit for about 2 days in the middle of writing this post!  Finally when I got it working again, Google wouldn't let me log in, since I was now "logging in from an unusual location".  I could either (a) verify based on access to an alternate email account (which is my old Telus account, which I don't have any more!) or receive a special code via SMS (to my Canadian Blackberry! which costs a small fortune to use here).  Oh the difficulties of travelling in China!  Not only that but I briefly lost my Blackberry, until I tore apart my entire room and found it in the bottom of my knapsack :-S)

I also installed Pleco, which is the world's greatest Chinese/English translation software and electronic dictionary.  It can recognize hand-written characters (very handy when I run into something I'm not familiar with which is like all the freakin' time) and it has a full English/Chinese dictionary.  In fact I was so impressed with this program (after I installed it on my tablet) that I bought a touch-screen Android phone just so I could have this program available to me all the time.  This has been a lifesaver on numerous occasions - reading menus, getting "instant translation" when talking to the locals, etc etc.  I still use my trusty little pocket dictionary (I'm a bit old-fashioned) but I've come to rely on Pleco and my trusty Android phone.

Also on my phone I have Weixin and QQ.  I've used Weixin but not QQ (the version of QQ on my phone is in Chinese only and I haven't figured out the menu :-().  These are the two most popular programs in all of China.  I've mentioned that people stand around playing with their phones - these are the programs that they're using.  In fact, when I give out my card with my "telephone number" and "email address" people look at me like I'm out of 2012 or something.  "What is your Weixin and QQ?"

Weixin ("微信") means "wee letter", kind of like a Twitter.  (A text is a duanxin "短信", or "short message".)  In English we call it "WeChat" or "WeeChat", pretty clever eh?  A pun in two languages.  Weixin is actually like a combination of Facebook and Twitter but with all the privacy removed (yes it has even less privacy than Facebook).  It includes a "look around" function that lets you see all the Weixin'ers in your vacinity, and allows you to look at their posts and photos.  I've been using it to keep in touch with my friends back in Beijing, and some of my new Chinese friends, but one of the fuwuyuan here came up to me and commented on  my photos.  I guess as a foreigner I kind of stand out when they're "looking around".  Handy stalking tool perhaps?

QQ is like Skype, or so I'm told.  Like I said my QQ is in Chinese and I haven't figure out how to use it.  A few of the Chinese folks have met want to "QQ" so I'll take a crack at it at some point.  In the meantime I'll email and Skype with the rest of the folks who are still stuck in 2012.

Speaking of technology, there are cameras everywhere!  On the subways, in the malls, even in the "ancient"parts of the city, where they stand out like a sore thumb:

Who watches all this stuff?  Like everything here in China, you can bet it's a labour-intensive process.  I have a theory that all the new buildings that are getting constructed here are for all the people they need to watch all the monitors from all the cameras everywhere.

They're even monitoring my blog!  Check out the following handy tool that comes with blogger, so I can keep an eye on you guys ;-) (this is from a couple of weeks ago):

Note the hits from China?  Isn't my blog blocked in China???  I'm sure having difficulty getting to it.  Who could be monitoring my blog from China?

(By the way did I mention that China is a wonderful place and things are perfect here and there is hardly any pollution at all?)

Flying to Kunming Tomorrow

I finished up my Xi'An Chinese classes today, and started to prepare for my flight tomorrow to Kunming.  Changed some money, picked up a few things, printed off my itinerary, other boring stuff.

I managed to find time to try pairing a nice Chinese red wine (which was good but not exceptional) with a Spicy beef with rice dish (which was also good but not exceptional) and this was definitely a case where the whole is more than the sum of the parts!  The pair went together wonderfully!  It was a nice finishing touch to my visit to Xi'An.  (Although this was actually my lunch at 3:30 this afternoon - it's now close to 8PM and I have to have dinner and pack.  Stuff is scattered around my room from my mad panic trying to find my Canadian Blackberry this morning, so I could re-activate my Google services.  More about that in another blog post!)

I'll be sure to do lots of interesting stuff in Kunming, and I'll also have a look around and see if the locals are still protesting the new chemical plant.  More to follow in the coming days!

Chinese Tea (and Food of course)

Have I posted a picture of my new tea mug yet? If I had access to my blog I could find out. (Internet connectivity is a big problem here. In fact I'm in the middle of writing a blog post on the Internet and technology in general in China, but ironically this work-in-progress is on my blog, which I can't access tonight :-S)

Anyways here it is:

It's pretty cool, it's thermally insulated, has a mason-jar-style lid (leak proof) and a clip-in tea leaf filter (which I can remove when I make coffee). All this for about $3 Canadian. I might bring a few back to Canada and start an import/export business.

Here's some tea I picked up:

Green tea from Chinese Costco, the rest from my local supermarket. A kind of black tea, chrysanthemum tea, lemon tea, and an all-in-one flower tea (it comes in little packets that contain different kinds of flowers, herbs, and rock sugar crystals). Pretty sweet! I've also been recommended Long Jiang tea (new in Xi'An within the past year) so I'm going to try that next.

Any tea drinkers out there?

Here are my last couple of meals:

A hot noodle soup, with tofu and some kind of mince meat. It was very hot and spicy! The noodles were made from potato.

Yang rou pao mo, a Saanxi Province specialty. Check out the giant cloves of garlic it was served with! Good thing I'm travelling on my own.

The Chinese Language (and Food, of course)

My afternoon class was bumped today, so I decided after my morning class to walk home and see what I could find.  It's a fairly log walk (about an hour and a half) but I didn't have anything else to do.  I happened to come across this food court:

I decided to test out my Chinese on a small noodle shop.  I told the lady I couldn't read the menu and could she recommend something for me, but then she just pointed up at her menu and said something really quickly.  I tried to decode as much as I could and ended up ordering "三和一面" (something like "3 in 1 noodles" I guess). There were a bunch of noodle dishes on the menu and this was the most expensive (8 RMB vs 7 RMB) so I figured it would be some kind of combo dish.

Here is the lady at work, check out all the delicious ingredients:

And here is the finished product.  Pretty much as expected, it came in a slightly larger bowl than the other dishes:

For an afternoon snack (after I got home and had a nap ... I must be on holiday or something) I decided to finally try Chinese wine.  I went to one of the patios on Bar Street and ordered a glass of Great Wall Red with a small plate of dried plums (i.e. raisins):

The wine was served chilled and it wasn't too bad!   It's not going to take the world market by storm, but I think it would go pretty well with the spicy beef I had at this same restaurant awhile back.  I think I'll return later and give the combo a try.

For dinner I decided to be *really* adventurous and try the chicken burger at my hostel, with a margarita.  How Chinese can you get??

Not a bad life, eh?  Learn some Chinese, nap, eat and drink.

(For comparison - breakfast 25 RMB; lunch noodles with a bottle of water 10 RMB; wine with raisins 65 RMB; chicken burger with margarita 68 RMB.  Guess which meal was purchased outside the "tourist zone"?  Also guess which had the most flavour?)

Speaking of learning Chinese, as you know (and would expect) despite all my lessons and hard work I'm having  lot of trouble with the Chinese Language.  I can barely pick out the odd word when someone is talking to me, and often I have a hard time communicating simple words.  (I don't expect it will ever improve.  I was talking to one of the other students this morning, who has been studying on and off for 4 years. I asked him if he's gotten to the point yet that he can actually communicate with people and he said no, he's still just trying to pick out the odd word for context.)

Of course every Chinese person I've talked to can't understand the difficulty.  "What's the problem?  The grammar is so easy!"  And it is, to a point.  You don't conjugate verbs, and there are relatively few grammar constructs (compared to English for example), but on the other hand the grammar rules that they *do* have are much more rigid.  If you get the word order wrong your sentence quickly becomes nonsensical, unlike in English where you can still get the gist.

(When I was hanging out with my Chinese friends at the Shaolin Temple, I mentioned  I bought some commemorative stamps, and one of the girls asked "How much did you buy for?"  (Or something like that.)  I said a hundred kuai, and then the young guy Brian got all incensed.  "How did you understand that???  She said it completely wrong," and etc.  But in English you can understand people when they say things completely wrong.  Not so Chinese.)

And there are many many many things in Chinese that are much much much more difficult, so thank heavens for un-conjugated verbs!

To start with, in English you have to earn 26 letters, and then some combinations that make different sounds (sh, th, tion, etc).  There are lots of exceptions, but once you've learned the rules you can sight read, and take a pretty good guess at how things might be spelled.

Not so Chinese!  There are 10's of thousands of characters.  The general feeling is you need to know at least 3000 to be considered "literate", along with the various word combinations that these 3000 make up.  And there are no rules, simple or otherwise, to help you guess at the sound of a character you don't know, or the characters representing a new word.  They have to be learned 1 by 1 and memorized.  (There are some conventions, like the radical might give you a clue to the meaning, and another part of the character might give you a hint to the sound, but these are just aids that can help in memorization, not rules you can use to help sightread a piece of unfamiliar text.)

The pronunciation is another whole other matter.  In addition to Mandarin's 4 "tones" (at least there are only 4; Cantonese has 9 tones) the pronunciation itself is very different from English.  There are 2 "sh" sounds (in pinyin "sh" and "x"), 2 "ch" sounds (pinyin "ch" and "q") and so forth.  For the different sounds you hold your tongue, lips etc in different positions, and some sounds are "aspirated" and some not. Not only does this make the language difficult for the English speaker to pronounce, it makes it MUCH more difficult to comprehend.

(One of my teachers is focusing on my pronunciation, so I'm hoping I will soon be able to differentiate "sh" from "sh", and "ch" from "ch".  Right now our conversation is going something like this:

"Che"
"No, che"
"Che"
"No"
"Che"
"Right!"
"Ok, Che"
"No, wrong"
Etc.

Wish me luck!  My tongue is exhausted!)