Potatoes

Week four has been a blur. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact I’m coming up on 30 consecutive days in China. I’ve settled into such a routine I feel more like I’m in intensive class with a little extra practice on the side more than anything else. It’s crazy different this feels from Italy last year, but I think that’s because in Italy the culture was at the forefront of every lesson and every excursion while here in Kunming, the focus has been language above all else and the culture is the what you make of it. It’s definitely a better approach for teaching, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve missed some critical things or experiences. This has lead to a more gun-ho philosophy these past couple days of making time to walk around and try new things above winding down or spending more time in the hotel with friends.

Monday I felt pretty awful in the morning, which confused me because my food choices were pretty mundane on Sunday...nevertheless I opted to stay home instead of attending morning class. Not a whole lot of new material was learned that day which made it easy to catch up. I didn’t want to pass up language partner time though because I was still assigned homework so I felt like I should definitely get the help I need when I have the two hours to get everything done. This was a fantastic move on my part because only an hour in Brandon and I had finished the light workload and were deciding what to do. Feeling adventurous, we decided to walk around and show our language partners the really cool shirt store Duncan and a couple others had discovered a week or so ago. That, and we had a hankering for some milk tea.

When we found the milk tea place we wanted to try was closed, our language partners discussed in rapid Mandarin for a moment before 韩晓康 simply said “Potato?” I had yet to eat a potato in China and was immediately on board. Brandon spent another moment or so deciding whether or not he’d rather find another place for milk tea but eventually he was in too. We walked down Wenhua street, which is where most of the restaurants we frequent are, and then at an intersection where we’ve only ever walked left or right... 韩晓康 took us straight, and the street just kept going. Brandon and I saw a bunch of cool shops we’d like to come back and visit at some point but for now our mission was guided solely by, “potato.” Eventually we came to a small hole-in-the-wall place with scantron-esque menus. No pictures rendered Brandon and I mostly useless besides our limited food vocab, but luckily we had the aide of the native Chinese speakers with enough English to explain to us what was going on. Together we settled on Papaya water, rice pudding thing, and sweet and salty fried potatoes. When the food arrived, Brandon and I were a little confused. The papaya water had come in bowls and I don’t think either of us were expecting to drink it with a spoon. Basically, it was water with a slight hint of papaya and a couple bits of rose chock full of grass jelly and molasses. It was delicious, and for the equivalent of $0.50, well worth the investment. The rest of the meal arrived shortly after and the potatoes were delicious. Think like small bits of potato covered in a sauce not entirely unlike ketchup but spicier and a decent amount of salt. The rice pudding thing was hot, which was not what I was expecting at first and it took me a little while to come to terms with that fact. Overall, probably some of the best food I’ve eaten for just shy of $2.

Tuesday, the majority of our group decided to spend the day solely speaking in Mandarin. Considering we are all at different levels, each person held out for a different amount of time. My trouble mostly came from other students who understand more vocab and grammatical structures than I do trying to communicate. They only know very specific vocab and grammar structures so the common tactic to try and reiterate would be to just increase in volume when I didn’t understand. Meanwhile, my teachers could try and phrase things in different ways til I caught on. This got really frustrating really fast particularly because it was hard for me to even voice that that was a problem. I did my best and held out until about 3 in the afternoon. I had to try and explain a card game to someone who was still only speaking Mandarin and at that point I decided I would rather play the game than just frustratingly point and hope the person understood. I did pick it back up again in contexts where I could understand most of the vocabulary...but it was really hard. I did have an awesome lunch break though. Instead of sticking around campus or grabbing food at one of our favorite lunch joints, I decided to grab a quick bite and go for a walk. I ended up at the beautiful park that borders Yunnan Normal University’s campus and spent about an hour weaving in between the trees and crossing incredibly scenic ponds. The walk also allowed me to create a fully circular map of the streets surrounding the University where before I only knew about the pockets and not the connecting roads. It was also in my trip around the lake for which the park is named, Green Lake, that I stumbled upon a giant yellow palace thing. It wasn’t until I left the palace that I found a sign explaining what it was, but from the outside it just looked like a big old building with a barren courtyard. All the signs were in Mandarin so for some of the historical significance I’m going to ask my language partner today, but it appeared to be a military museum with various areas dedicated to Chinese involvement in world conflicts. I found this awesome room about World War 2 and the “Chinese Expeditionary Force” that from the pictures I was seeing I think teamed up with the Americans against the Japanese. I’m not entirely sure so I’ll definitely find some time to translate the captions to the pictures I found. The place was officially called the “Yunnan Military Academy Museum” which made a lot of sense after watching old war footage and trying to decided what was going on. After that, I showed 韩晓康 pictures of Nikka and BB to pass the time with another light homework day. We didn’t do very much of excitement that evening, we went to our favorite Japanese restaurant for dinner and then Jonathan showed us this really cool video game a little bit like Mario Party that kept us up far later than it should have.