Kunming 昆明 - Part II

Continued from Kunming 昆明 - part I ...

I did promise to talk a bit about the club thing here. Clubs and bars are not really what you'd call traditional China, but they seem to be abundant in all big cities.


It's definitely an interesting mix of old and new.
The clubs usually have a mix of music, but all and all focused on trashy club-trance, technosized dance and Chinese hits, and most important - make it loud (nothing new so far).
Although these are - generally speaking - clubs, and the atmosphere is dancing, most of the clubs don't really have a proper dance floor (a few do), but rather the full place is filled with small round tables all over what was supposed to be the dance floor (and why not, if people are ready to stand there and buy an extra bottle).

Kundu club

These clubs usually add on some color in the way of some life acts - triplets of skinny dancers with minimal clothing, drag queens, Chinese pop wannabe singers. These moments are usually when the music might get semi-descent for a little while.

"Disco" in Kundu is as trashy a place as you can get, but it has an operational dance-floor, with a nice ratio of about 100 men/ 1 woman, and a wannabe radio-MC's that interrupt the music every roughly 20 seconds, so if you have some patience you can enjoy it. Around 1:15, just after the daily drag-queen finishes her thing, there's a moment of descent trance when they put on "Infected Mushroom".

Drinks of the day are warm Beers - bought at multiples (usually, about a dozen a time), or Whiskey mixed generously with room-temperature green tea. Either is drunk from very small glasses.
The beers are around 3-3.5%, and so is the mix of Whiskey with tea (thank god for that).
The whiskey, is the local breweries finest, usually bottled in your choice of Chivas Regal or Johnie Walker Black. If you really want to splash out - you are entertaining people or female company and you feel for some reason that you want to show off with spending extra money - you can usually opt in to pay twice and have the same Whiskey presented in a more classic way (say, in a 18 year-old Chivas bottle).

The tendency in the clubs is to try and get you a table, were you would normally be presented with a menu suggesting that you buy a whole bottle of Whiskey or a couple of dozen beer-bottles. They seem to fail to understand that one person does not require a whole bottle (or a table). And it's not necessarily a language barrier.
Not to despair. The trick is to arrive when the place is full - so they do not really have any tables to try and sit you at. Arriving to the main club areas after 11:30 or so, will usually allow one to just be ignored entering the place, and then go around as you will and enjoy.

This version of clubbing is so not standard, that it might actually be difficult in this case to get yourself a drink, or even find out where the bar is hidden.
Also, most of the clubs only (!) stock Whiskey and beers (bad beers), so you'd need to do some club-hopping to find out one where you can get your Cuba Libre flowing. But if you're ready to experiment a bit, and walk out whenever someone insists on escorting you to a table of your own - you'll be in for a good evening before too long.

While standing around the tables and drinking, it is highly important to have some drinking-facilitation. This comes in the form of games. There are a few favorites around, and it most of the clubs you'll see most of the people deeply occupied with padded glasses (usually red) from which they are rolling dice, or otherwise you'd see them playing cards or waving their hands frantically as they play group-stone-paper-scissors. I'm starting to slowly get the idea behind some of these, so might at some point do a post with the rules for some of these.
Getting the point, however, doesn't really help matters - as you might end up being too good and hence not drinking enough - bad company in other words.

Assorted Yunnan mushrooms on a Kunming street

There is one game, however, which stands out as a clear all-around favorite.
Called "get the foreigner drunk". EVERYBODY just loves this game, and I actually enjoyed it on my first night.
Really, if you don't mind drinking only the tea'd-Whiskey and warm beers, there is not particular need to spend money at all. You just get to a club, and stand or stroll slowly between the tables. They all stare at the foreigner anyway (Kunming is actually full with foreigners, but it seems they like to hang out together in foreigner-oriented bars, so I very rarely saw any foreigners inside the clubs so far), so before too long - someone will add to the smile a "cheers" movement. You can reply with an empty hand (which will speed up the next step), or cling glasses and have a sip (which will bring the next step just as fast), and then they'll signal you to get close to the table, where a glass is already being filled for you with beer/ whiskey. They might let you off the hook the first time (that's in the case that first toast will include all residents of the table), but by the second glass if they're patient, they'll make you understand they expect you to drink-up properly. This is because they person you just drank with did the same.


Only that the table is with 10 people around it, and once you've cleared the glass, it's being filled again so that you can drink with the next person down the line. When the table is more or less done with the round, there can be a few options (and don't forget, there is not much communication involved other than the toasts).
Possibly, if they found you really intriguing (and you have not found the experience too boring yet), they might continue with toasts, this time more sporadically, not in clear round-the-table order, and will point for you some nice girls (I cannot say about pointing boys for girls, as I hadn't had the pleasure). This is true event if they are themselves girls (assuming a mixed table). Also, usually, you'd find out quickly enough that a table nearby wants a piece of the action, so you'd be pulled a bit to have some drinks with them as well.
Sometimes, they'd actually release you after the first round by smiling politely while waving you goodbye.

Midday Siesta in Kunming, by the East Pagoda

On my first night here, I was actually pulled away from the table I was drinking with by some nice Chinese girl. The people at the table with me motioned me positively to go and follow her (she was not from the next table). I had a feeling that this was something of a more official nature, as I was following her towards the exit of the club, but just as we reached the exit, she turned right, and after a few more meters we reached a table with her friends. She just wanted to treat her friends for a round of their favorite game, after which I got the sign that I can go back to my original "friends".


At nights like this, you really get to appreciate the super-weak beers, the extra tea in the Whiskey, and especially the extra-small glasses. It all suddenly makes sense.

Taking a stroll - Kunming streets

I was surprised to find out that not a lot of people in the school (living here for a while) have noticed that, but Kunming has what seems to be a surprisingly big Gay community. At least on the male part. This might not be as straightforward to see, I guess (if you're blind), since a lot of men here can be seen as having somewhat of a gayish behavior - specially around foreigners in clubs - and even the gays tend to not kiss here outdoors, but still - this can get quite obvious. The men-women ratio, as mentioned, is not favoring men, so you might not be sure at a first glance, but on some nights in some clubs, and on the streets as well, this is becoming more and more obvious for anyone who cares to look.
I wouldn't know to say much about a gay "scene" here as such, and I didn't run into any gay clubs per-se, but they are definitely here in numbers, and not hiding.


Another option in Kunming, is to go for a bit of inspiration on Green-lake park. Specially in the evenings (or early mornings, as I hear well from my window), you can find people practice their Chinese-opera singing (usually, they have been practicing for many many years with no apparent success, but are not deterred by this technicality), Tai-chi, or what seems to be quite popular, dancing in groups to the sound of Techno. The Techno groups are mixed with a tendency for older crowd, and there's usually some sort of a leader-figure that in between tracks gives instructions about the steps for the next track. Really cool staff.

Street beggars - definitely exist here, but very easygoing for China - no groping, no heavy insitence - nothing like what one will experience in Shanghai or Shenzhen

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Kunming 昆明 - part I

If you're interested in some general information and stats about Kunming, you can go ahead and look here.
To cover the basics for context, Kunming is the capital of Yunnan Province, has a population of 3-8 million (depends on definition and who you're asking), and is quite elevated at 1,900m - the last fact has helped get it its nickname "spring city".

Yunnan - the province - is the south-western-most province in China, bordering with Vietnam Laos and Burma, and further surrounded by Tibet, Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou and Guangxi.

As the capital city of Yunnan, you can find here people and food influenced by the surroundings and various ethnicities,mainly Hui (Muslims), Dai (Thai related) and Yi, but unfortunately, the Hui are not as connected to the Muslim Asians as those in  Xinjiang (the north-western-most Province), and there is a clear lack of Lamb meat dishes around.

Kunming at night

Kunming's elevation/ moderate weather/ "Spring city" status can remind one of Dublin in a few ways. For one, there is a relative lack of mosquitoes. This was quite a surprising finding, as some pre-reading suggested that mosquitoes are around as much as in any other place (minus Ireland), as did the nets on all the windows in my apartment.
OK, the nets on the windows, and the 24th floor dwelling may be of some influence, but I still found it surprising to have waited a whole week before getting beaten for the first time, including a couple of days in Jiang-Shui to the south - a city with a lot of water and rice paddies around it.

And there's the weather. Yes, it's August, and it can get at time pretty hot, but in this area, getting as hot as 30 degrees, is as good as it gets. The weather really does resemble Dublin - on an average day, you can go through the 4 seasons, from a strong rain to clear sunny skies, from chilly to hot. It's only about 5-10 degrees above the average temperatures in Dublin.

Taking the kids for some recreation in the city center

Kunming's main commercial street

The Game of the day in Kunming is playing Chicken with the cars/ buses/ taxis and the thousands of small electrical scooters on the streets. In most of the road you want to cross, you will not find proper traffic-lights, although the traffic is quite heavy, and the way to go is just go and hope for the best. None of the vehicles is taking much note of any of the traffic rules or signs anyway.
The way to go is jump in front of the cars, with the assumption that the cars will just decide to stop.

The traffic in Kunming brings us to an important observation (just before we can to some fun staff about clubs and drinking, so hang in there).

reminiscing on better days

The traffic is just a small example of what I see more and more to be the most fertile ground for Game-Theorists. Behavior of the Chinese seems to be as basically rationale (in a pure economic sense) as it gets, every behavior being cost-benefit based (on the personal level), driven strongly by considerations of gains and losses.
This means that China can be a great place to experiment and implement economic behavioral theories, a great place for government intervention mechanisms, Mechanism Design implementations, etc.

This also (probably) implies that old-school management techniques applying good-old stick-and-carrot probably work best here.

"Cheap talk" is at revealing itself here in full, and any verbal agreements between people here, are only held to the extent that those agreements work well for all parties later on.

I spent most of last week here with no light in the bathroom. On Friday, when my roommate (Zhang Laoshi, you remember him) finished partially repairing the pipe issue (don't ask), it turns out that on the way the light somehow stopped working. As I notified the American here (Jonathan), he said no problem, Zhang is heading anyway for some shopping today (Friday), so he'll buy a new light on the way.
On Saturday, I notified Jonathan again that I am still taking showers in the dump, and got the usual: "oh? But Zhang said he fixed it. I'll see to it, it will be fixed today. Sounds good."
On Sunday morning, I ran into Zhang in the apartment. He casually asked me about drinking together that evening. In return, I opted for losing face, and raised my voice a bit when asking him about the light in the bathroom. He said "I'm not sure there's a problem". ...
I ended up raising the tone a notch when asking him how can it take a whole week to change a bulb. This of course would not have had a particular influence other than where the conversation has started.
That evening we were sharing a couple of glasses of BaiJiu and MiJiu (52% and 25% local alcohols), enjoying the light coming out of the bathroom.

One of the few cities within the city - the East Pagoda

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Learning Chinese in Kunming II - 在昆明学习汉语

I had to take things a bit into my own hands, apparently.

For the next day, I went to sleep rather early, and got to class equipped with some energy drinks and a bunch of my own ideas on picking up Chinese. And I don't only mean me finding opportunities to use my 3 words' worth of vocabulary on the streets.

My teacher quickly figured out that I have some expectations, such as that I will get some homework to do in between classes, and more importantly - that I expect her to actually do some homework, and get to class with some sort of a plan. How this was to be rolled out, was to change a few times over the following days, but the basic idea worked, and I'd say we're now on a good route - plan or no plan.

As I mentioned already, the girl can run on talking without a stop for hours - like the little energizer bunny. The 4 hours are real full 4 hours, and I feel quite bad when I have to stop her for 10 minutes to get a refresher mid-way, as my brain reaches its attention limits.

There's also this little rule of speaking only Chinese ... well, we broke that rule on the second day, and through it out the window completely by the 3rd. What doesn't make sense doesn't make sense, and when I need to understand why a word is being used in a certain way - I need to be actually able to figure out the explanation. Guess it's just the weird way my brain functions, what can you do.

Another big step forward, was when at some point she realized the depth of my not understanding her when she speaks. I guess that my gesture-interpretation genius through her off in the beginning (can't really blame her). She still seems to assume I just know a whole lot of staff that I don't, but by now she understood that if I am to understand anything, she needs to slow down her bugs-bunny pace, talk a word at a time, and then repeat. This seems to work better.

With all of this working in our favor, we're making now some real progress, and I only have to try and follow the teach' pace. If not, my notebook is being filled with things that I will be able to try and actually remember over the next few months, but I'd say I'll be reaching at least the level I got in Portuguese/ Spanish during travel in the past, within these first 3 weeks.

Another great way to practice your Chinese - your next door pub.
(unfortunately, just realized all my pictures were automatically resized to to square formats here, so adding now some blanks to correct)

I'll be definitely giving an update on how this all works out later on, but guess we can turn some of the attention on this post to some observations on Education in China.

I've made a quick attempt in the first post to over generalize and bad-mouth a bit on Chinese work ethics. I actually have quite a few Chinese colleagues that are marvelous, so obviously I'm aware of the worth of generalizations, but the observations are observations, and some previous readings kind of support it.
Either way, there was no real debate following the little remarks from my Chinese friends or otherwise (either because they agree, or more probably because they're being polite), so I'll go ahead with some more observations.

Chinese education has some problems. This is probably not a significant insight, and with the changes this country is continuously going through, it is not a big deal to figure out they have to keep on struggling with how to approach education.

As always, my observations are only due to a very incidental run-in to some education-related cases, but 2 cases for me are enough for some sort of feeler.

Education has been key for Chinese people for a while apparently. This is the way for a lot of children to "be successful", and get out of poverty. Along with the general views on child education in Asia, this can be quite tough on the children.

Not too long ago, my teacher went through 15 hours of school 6 days a week, and then only about 7 on the Sundays - not much room for individual development. These days are gone now, but the teacher figure here still carries some weight with it.

What brought me to feel not too comfortable about some of the education methods here are a couple of cases I ran into, but one of them in particular.

I had a couple of chances to make very short visit to Yunnan university here. During both occasions, it took less then 5 mins of me sitting somewhere for a bunch of students to approach me on an assignment from their Teacher. There were enough similarities in both cases, and 2/2 within very short visits was enough for me to start feeling bad. Similarities such as going around and marketing the teacher's greatness, while also trying to make some money in the same time.

Of course there can be some good things to these assignments (the first of which was given by the Taekwondo teacher, no less), but something about the all thing just felt really wrong.

The second case, had two children (by the look, teenagers) that approached me - in English - while I was writing something in my notebook, telling me, "our teacher asked us to make a presentation for you".  "OK ..." (exactly the kind of entertainment I was looking for).

They immediately gave me also the teacher's business card. Name's Sixing Xie, card is boasting a horizon-looking picture of the guy, wearing an Olympic games shirt, the address for his disfunctional site as well as another Chinese blog entry, and behind a quote of his moto (I wouldn't be able to read that, but I'd imagine it would be in the lines of "I'm great - make me your congressman", or the Chinese equivalent). Well, actually I had someone here give me a loose translation - something about improving your future by strengthening your memory. In line with the little show-and-tell I got from his little minions.

The blog has some pictures of his - none of them actually reveals his connection to the Olympic games, but all involve group photos as he visits the people ...

So the two children start their little "presentation" by telling me they can remember numbers if I tell them, and write down in my note book - and they'll repeat. Soon this went for another version in which they would recite the first 200 digits of Pai (just in time, I just forgot the 157's digit which I need for one of my passwords).
After some initial confusion with the English version, they just wrote it down for me in my notebook, and then recited in Chinese.

When they told me they memorized the 200 digits of Pai, I asked them "Why?"
The blank stairs to me and between themselves only lasted a few seconds, and then they understood my question, and answered with confidence "out teacher told us to".
After the little recital, I asked them again, "Why?", and this time elaborated a bit more on why do they need to know all these Pai digits.

The answer for this was also quite easy, and seems to be a translation of some of what's on the back of the card I received - it will help us have a better future.
Right you are.

I am not one to argue the advantages of exercising one's mind - memory, thinking, logic, the whole Shebang. And we've all seen people selling memory-improvement magic-solutions all over the place.

But then came the great finale - they showed me some of their class' logos on these little pins. (Great, I'm gonna be a honorary observer now).

But not just yet - money came up. "You can buy those for ..." (looking at each other) "... 20 dollars" (That's ok, that's the general translation to units-of-money, and they meant the equivalent of 2 Euro).
It was my turn to give the blank stare now, and while I was at it, they added - "we can give you the card for free..." (that's the card with the pretty picture of their teacher.

After another minute of a blank stupid stare - admittedly I was torn about the best approach - I eventually decided to try and make some sense of it.
"And your teacher told you to also ask for money?"
"Yes, he says that we should learn how to take care of ourselves, make money for ourselves"
(by annoying innocent people on the street, and then basically play beggars asking for them to buy useless pins?!)

So, basically, I gave them a quick speech. First on the card (and the pins) - I appreciate you're giving it to me for free, but this is not for me this is ... (I tried a few words until one of them picked up on this one) advertisement for your teacher. You are doing this for him, not for me.

Then I went on with some general lecturing about the whole idea, and told them that "you can tell your teacher I said so".
They were quite immobile, thinking of when it will be polite enough for them to run away from there.

And then, I'm ashamed to say, I did the worst thing - I gave them some money, and sent them on their way. (Just couldn't let these obviously talented kids run away with a sense of failure)
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Learning Chinese in Kunming I - 在昆明学习汉语

My first week coming into Kunming was pretty militant-style. After roughly 24 hours in the way, I reached the apartment on Sunday evening, but seeing that the hour-difference would not be sleeping-friendly anyway, I opted into immediate exploration of some of Kunming's nightlife. More on that in the next post about Kunming itself, but this means I ended up back to the apartment at around 2AM.

Next morning, bright and early, I was ready for my schooling experience to begin at 8:30 AM (that's 1:30AM on my bio-clock). Having reached the "school" - an apartment 2 floors under the apartment I'm staying in - I found out that they decided to take pity of me, and postpone the class by an hour. Later at the end if the day, I found out that taking pity of me actually meant deleting one hour rather then postponing, as they let me know that the program is one hour less then what I figured. (this has later been settled, after I had to take them through some of the Emails they have sent me)

Anyway, this first day was only 3 hours - but a real treat. As might have been expected, there is no real plan-of-action, and I'd say they're as amateur as it gets - rather arbitraging between lowly-paid young tutors and highly paying foreigners. This was to be expected to some degree, but I thought they'd have some sort of a school general program, recommended books to follow, would be familiar with industry available courses, ...

But of course this was not to be - me mentioning in advance the type of self-studying and material I was using had zero meaning, when I asked them about supporting material (as in Chinese-study books) that drew some long blank stares. Eventually they gave me a good book that I can work through with my teacher on - that book is from somewhere in the deep 90's, teach says words are not really used these days, and as it turned out, this was one book out of a set of five, which is only used for the extra listening exercises (only no CD attached). Told me no problem getting the other parts in any bookstore, but of course nobody in any bookstore has heard of these books in the last 10 years.

No better way to practice a few words in Chinese than over a Chongqing-style Hot Pot.

Still, by 9:30 we were there, me and my teacher bunked in one of the rooms in the office/ school, and off we go ...

The one rule that this school did decide to adopt as part of their serious-business philosophy - "No English in class". Awesome. So I spent the first day - 3 hours straight listening to my teacher speaking Chinese. It can be a lot of fun. And specially when you are on an extreme jetleg, this can be extra useful, as you can feel less apologetic about not really following what is being said, and can float back and forth between complete day-dreaming and quasi-following of the teacher's gestures.

I have to give it to her - she can really carry a monologue. No problem starting to speak at 9:30, and naturally stopping to speak at 12:30, as planned.
From the little I could gather from a few key-words in English (shhh... don't tell the school) she allowed herself to put in between, gestures etc, it seems like she was mainly going around about our non-existent plan for my schooling.Something around us picking up different subjects of importance (food/ restaurant, travel, money, shopping, ...), creating a story around those, and then practicing using the key sentences from the story.

But I already figured out the plan: It's like one of those movies - you've all seen those. The foreigner falls captive in a small remote village up in the mountains, understanding not one word. They keep talking to him in a language he does not understand, and over time (usually visualized through a few seasons changing), the Chinese/ Japanese/ Korean/ Vietnamese naturally changes into English to represent the Foreigner's natural adaption of the language.

Guess they've been watching too many of those movies ... not to mention that I don't really have a few seasons to spend in this school.

Of course, I had to take a bit of control of my own schooling ...

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