We're packing our bags and tying up all the loose ends in order to leave by bus tonight at 7pm for the Vietnamese border. It's a night bus that has rows of bunk beds installed in the cabin. I've never ridden one before, so I'm excited to find out how that goes. I'm counting my lucky stars that I'm not 6 feet tall. I should be able to fit in one of the beds pretty comfortably. We've got a bag full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches - prepared more out of habit than economic necessity. We can get food cheaper than PBJs at any bus station we stop at along the way. It's really hard to under-price the Chinese.
As I'm tying up logistical loose ends here in Kunming, I figured that I could also tie up some loose ends on the blog. Here's a recap of how things ended up during our adventures in China:
The first student that I was tutoring who I was waiting so patiently for payment from back in April ended up not working out. After four weeks (8 hours) of instruction, her Dad finally paid me for my work (about $32 per hour) and then told me that his daughter had a school function and could no longer take classes from me. It was a pretty thinly veiled excuse for just not wanting to continue with me as a tutor. I'm not sure if my teaching capabilities, the price or who knows what else were the cause of the abrupt ending, but according to others I talked to who had been in the same boat, I got off pretty well. The money pretty much paid for a trip out to the mountains in northwest Yunnan, so it certainly wasn't a waste of time. A few weeks after the "break-up", our roommate's friend hired my services for her daughter and so I continued teaching. One day, she brought in a friend, a little eight year old boy with the English name "Brutus". Meeting a Chinese eight year old named "Brutus" was a very special treat.
The protest against the proposed petrochemicals factory that was supposed to take place June 6 never materialized. Police were out in force - we had seen pictures and heard that police were lined up every 20 feet along the street in the downtown area. Lots of people wore white that day, the official color of the anti-factory protesters, but no crowds gathered for a demonstration. People have more-or-less quit talking about the factory and so I assume that it will go on ahead as planned. The Chinese government demonstrated in Kunming how effective it can be at dealing with dissent.
I sold my bike right before we left for Beijing for the same price that I bought it for, which is a win in my book, but Chinese friends chided me for not selling it for more than I bought it for. I've missed not having it these past weeks and have often cursed the buses for coming so infrequently and being so crowded when they do come. I can't wait to get another bike when I get to Italy.
Last week, I met an old man in the park who asked me for help with English. Over the past week, I've gone over to his house a couple of times and helped him make sense of a month-long trip he made to the US in 2010. As weird as China seems to any American, the US is at least as weird to the Chinese. Making sense of baseball, gift shops, Native Americans, wagon trains, settlers and Mormonism all at once can be a daunting task, so I sat with him as he went through his pictures of his trip. He's started writing out the text of signs and displays that he took pictures in and translating it into Chinese. He says he'll publish a book about it, but I'm not sure how much of a market that will have. Then again, this is China, what do I know about the Chinese reading market. The experience with him reinforced my desire to learn Chinese well enough to go on a Chinese organized tour of the US. I'd see a completely different country than the one I was used to.
The sad part about leaving China is that I know whatever knowledge and instinct I have for this place will evaporate so quickly after I leave. I like looking back over the past four months to see how China has shaped me. How I can see the world a little better from the Chinese perspective, how I can acquire everything I need in order to survive. As we move through southeast Asia over the next 6 weeks, I know that most of our time will be spent just figuring out how to get what we need and we won't have as much time to interact with a place. I like that we stayed in Kunming long enough to see the seasons change and discover weekly patterns in life: coming to expect the late afternoon drone of the pickled vegetable lady walking down the street announcing her business; hearing the "ding-ding-tang" lady come down the street ringing her bell and advertising her chewy sweets; waking up in the morning to marching music playing at the elementary school across the street from us. We won't get to establish all of those patterns again until we get to Italy. But I'm also incredibly excited about travelling through this corner of Asia. I'm also very excited to jump in an ocean. I haven't been in the sea for nearly 2 years, and I haven't swam since January.
For those interested in following us along on the trip, here's a rough itinerary of where we'll be and when. Bryn made this map and the approximate schedule is below:
June 20: overnight bus to Vietnamese border, train to Hanoi
June 21-23: Hanoi
June 23: overnight train to Hue/Denang/Hoi An
~June 26: train in Nha Trang, on to Ho Chi Minh City
June 30th: swing dance in HCMC
July 1-4: Mekong Delta, boat to Phnom Pehn, Cambodia
July 4- swing dance in Phnom Pehn
July 6-7: Angkor Wat, Cambodia
July 8: take a boat to Battambang, Cambodia
July 12: Get to Bangkok, swing dance in Bangkok
July 15: Fly to Mandalay, Myanmar play in Myanmar for ten days
July 26: Fly back to Bangkok, maybe swing dance, maybe take off for the beach
~July 31: Get to Malaysia, take the Jungle Line across central Malaysia
~August 4: Arrive in Singapore
AUGUST 6: Bryn's Birthday
August 9: Leave for Italy
August 10: Arrive in Bologna!
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