Province. Our local guide was especially good at explaining the
culture of the province, so I'm leaving here feeling like I know a lot
more about Kunming than other places we've been. China has around 55
minority groups, and something like 25 of them are only found in this
province. Last night we went to a show that had the traditional dances
and music of some of the minority groups. It was incredible! I am
guessing they modernized it a lot for their 100% tourist audience, but
I still feel like I have a pretty good idea of the general styles.
One of the sixteen people on this trip had the common sense to bring a
China guidebook, so we turn to her for guidance about each city. It's
not that we don't trust our guide—we really like her—but she has a
very clear itinerary and set of speaking guidelines, so we often don't
get all of the information we want. For Kunming, the guidebook
basically says that the only thing for tourists to do here is go to
the Stone Forest, which is actually an hour outside the city. Living
up to our expectations, we spent all day yesterday at the Stone
Forest. The Stone Forest used to be covered by a lake, and over time,
due to Himalayan plate movement and erosion from the water, these tall
stone columns formed everywhere. I could not envision it at all before
we got there, but it really does look like a bunch of tall, stone tree
trunks with real trees interspersed between them. When you walk among
them, it is like a combination of weaving through tree trunks in a
forest and walking through caves with roofs that have fallen in. Ok- I
didn't do a great job describing this. Check out my pictures when I
post them. It was really cool to see though—almost magical. Definitely
not like anything I have ever seen before.
That's about it for Kunming. Now we're on an airplane waiting to take
off but are delayed for air traffic control reasons. This doesn't make
a lot of sense to me because, according to the departure board, there
are only about 6 planes leaving each hour. But I'm just gonna go with
it. They're showing a white water kayaking competition on the TV,
which seems pretty random, but, again, I'm going with it. I'll use
this time to write about some more general observations about China.
Architecture:
Everything is China is big. They have a huge influx of people moving
to the cities (remember when I said 8 million people was just a medium
sized city?) so everywhere we've been, the skies have been filled with
half completed apartment buildings that look a lot like the projects
in NYC, but are a little nicer and a lot bigger. Our guide joked that
the national bird of China is the construction crane. Other than the
completely boring and huge apartment buildings, China is full of the
most creative office buildings I have ever seen. Every building has
some kind of unique element to make it stand out from all the other
equally unique buildings. There are skyscrapers that are odd shapes,
consist of uncommon materials, or have huge sculptures on top. I'm
convinced that there is some big competition between all architects to
build the most creative building.
Fashion:
-Screen printed tee shirts in English are really popular here, but
most of them make NO sense. I'm not sure whether the people wearing
them just don't understand what they say or whether they know it makes
no sense and see it as a fashion statement. Most shirts are
accompanied by graphics that have no relationship to the words on the
shirt whatsoever, but here are two examples: Our adult, professional
tour guide wore a shirt the other day that said
"FREE
keeps evolving
ALIVE"
Oh, and the capitalized words were also glittery. Then, shopping in a
store a few days ago, I saw a shirt that said
"Big Rooster
Since 1983
Pursue Character
wear out the your it's best own style"
-One of the most popular hats that are sold in tourist shops and that
people wear here are fake panama hats that say "Ronaldino" across the
front. The "n" has a little tilde over it but I can't figure out how
to type that into this blog. Now I'm not super up to date on my sports
trivia, but the only association I have with that name is a famous
soccer player from (I think) Argentina a few years ago. I've asked
about a dozen people here what that means and nobody knows. I have a
hard time believing this is the same Ronaldino the hat refers to, but
I have no better explanation. Maybe the Chinese just really like South
American soccer players. Weirder things have happened…
-I haven't seen a single baby here wearing diapers. Instead, they all
wear pants with giant slits in the middle so that their butts hang
out. I guess it saves a lot of time doing laundry, and it's pretty
cute, but still doesn't seem super sanitary.
Weddings:
We see brides everywhere we go. I guess in a country of 1.3 billion
people, a lot of people get married every day. One of the people on my
trip (the only other one under 60ish) just got engaged, so we've been
talking about weddings a lot. All of the brides that we've seen wear
Western-style, white poofy dresses and, of course, all of the brides
are beautiful. Traditionally in China though, white is the color one
wears to a funeral, so the young brides usually compromise with their
parents and wear a traditional red dress to the wedding reception. One
of my favorite new customs that our guide told us about is that when
it is time to put on the rings, they are flown across the room to the
bride and groom via remote control helicopter. How creative!
Ok. The plane is finally taking off. Yangtze river cruise here I come!
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