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.)