a long email I wrote to friends and family that I'll post here for posterities sake...
Right now we are still in Kunming. We flew here on Wednesday night. On Thursday, we went to a nearby mountain and road a cable car up to the top. That always scares me, because it seems so unsafe. All that's keeping us from falling out is our own common sense! It's like a ski lift, and I'm always nervous that the kids are going to jump out or lean over too far. Thankfully, they have more sense than that :) At the top of the mountain are several Taoist shrines that were carved into the face of the mountain by Taoist monks. It's simply amazing. The kids liked it ok, but it was a long day for them and they were full of complaints. We had dinner plans that night to meet up with Chris' study abroad advisors from when he was here in 2001. They took us to this really cool place called 1923 and it is decorated in an old, traditional style. We ate outside in a glass house and we had to walk across a small stream on stepping stones to get to it. Zack whined and whined and whined the whole dang time! Not just Zack, but mostly Zack. Meanwhile, Chris is talking shop with the husband. Chris is trying to get a lot of details worked out for his summer teen adventure trek that he's in charge of (with the broadreach program). Since he will be bringing the kids here to Kunming, and since his advisors have years of experience running study abroad in this area, they are a very valuable resource to him. I didn't begrudge him talking business, not at all. However, the wife and I were just sitting there sort of left out of the conversation. I was trying to appease my grouchy kids, trying not to offend them with my rude kids who refused to eat any of the food they ordered. I was feeding Josh his noodles because he can't feed himself these super long noodles without making a complete mess. Meanwhile Zack and Petey won't eat a think and just sit there saying "can we go now!?" Ack, it was horrible. To top it off, we were an hour late meeting them for dinner because traffic was so bad coming back from the mountain.
So, despite the fact that Chris and I were very upset at the boys, we resolved to have a better day the next day. We realize that vacations are hard for everyone involved, and especially for children. Eating dinner at a fancy restaurant with people they don't know isn't exactly the best time for a kids good manners to shine through. We had a good family prayer and we all determined to be more patient and loving with each other tomorrow (which, as I write this, was yesterday).
In the morning we got up early to get ready to go to the Stone Forest. When you have time, do a google search for photos of the stone forest in Yunnan province. It was so amazing. We had a wonderful time there and took lots of amazing pics of our own. We planned on having McDonalds for breakfast because the hotel here serves mainly a Chinese breakfast (noodles, veggies, basically same food as dinner). Unfortunately, McDonalds isn't open for breakfast and we ended up having dumplings and noodles for breakfast anyway. The drive to the stone forest was pretty long, almost two hours. Still, I loved it. I'm getting to see rural China, finally! The part we live in, Nanjing, has been very populated for thousands of years. There really isn't much "rural" left. But now I'm seeing it and it's beautiful, so rustic and amazing. As Chris says, just think these people have been living this way for hundreds of years. They are happy and content to live this way. You should see their beautiful smiles. Once we got to the stone forest we just went in and explored. We pretty much let the kids determine which paths we would take and ended up getting somewhat lost in the maze of stones. It's almost like a cave but outside. I've never seen anything like it in my life. However, we couldn't really get "lost" because the places was way crowded with tourists. Zack got quite upset at one point when he wandered away from us and a Chinese woman grabbed his arm and tried to pull him with her. He told me he had to push her away and run away really quickly. He was pretty upset by that, and who can blame him! We had several personal space invasions while we were there. However, we had some neat experiences too. For example, a man reached out his hand to Zack to shake hands. At first, Zack didn't want to and he walked away, but then he thought better of it and went back to shake the guys hand. I was proud of him for being so friendly.
When we finally found our way out of the stones, we went to the closest Chinese restaurant to eat and had noodles and duck. Noodles and duck are always a safe bet for the kids. They ate pretty well. While we were there, another man came up to shake Zack's hand. After Zack shook his hand, the man went back to his table and then came back with a bottle of beer. He wanted to give Zack some! We said nonononono! The guy just laughed, but he looked surprised at our objections.
On the way home, we went on back roads for half of the way. This was sort of an accident as our driver missed the turn off to the highway, but once again, I didn't mind at all. In several of the hillsides that we drove past, I saw tombs. At first we thought they were shrines to the land gods, but we soon saw they were tombs. They were all really well taken care of. I wonder how old they are? It's so neat how Chinese don't forget about taking care of their ancestors graves. It turned out to be a really good thing that we took the back road home. It ran parallel to the high way some of the time, so we could see the high way. Often the highway was above us. On the way to the stone forest, we had passed a horrible car accident. Multiple trucks, SUV's and cars were smashed together. We even saw a man (most likely dead) hanging out of his truck. People were just standing around. I'll never forget the sight of that man. Traffic was backed up for miles. As we were returning on the back road, we drove past the accident site and it was still there! This was 5-6 hours later and traffic was still jam-packed together. Thank goodness we took the back roads!
We had another business dinner that night, but we were determined to make it much more bearable. We fed the kids McDonalds before we went to the dinner. I think our hosts were a little surprised, and baffled, as to why we had fed the kids ahead of time, but that's ok. At least the kids were very well behaved. I also took crayons and lots of paper and worksheets for them to work on. That went really well, too. Also, one of our hosts had brought her 7 year old son, so they had lots of fun playing with him too. All in all, a much better day. Oh, btw, the business dinner that night ended up being at the same place we'd eaten the night before! We made the boys promise not to say anything about it, and they didn't. We ate inside this time, not in the glass house. The inside was a traditional style Chinese house, with the rooms all opening to a common courtyard. Very cool. Also, I ate pig feet. I didn't like it, and it was way too spicy for me. But I tried!
We were scheduled to leave Kunming today and take the bus to Dali. However, we've decided to stay another day. There's a museum in town with 5 dinosaur fossils that we want to take the boys to. I want to go to the Buddhist temple, as well. We're on vacation, right? There's no need to rush around from city to city. We're just going to take it easy and enjoy ourselves as much as possible.
Kunming is so much more "Chinese" than Nanjing. In Nanjing, it's entirely possible to never eat Chinese. There are so many western restaurants everywhere. Not here. It is actually quite hard to find western food and it's just going to get worse as the vacation goes on. The next two towns we travel to are much, much smaller. If we lived here our boys would be eating Chinese food like champs because they wouldn't have a choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment