Yunnan

Immediately proceeding the trip to Taiwan was our second school trip of the year, our two and a half week long trip to the Yunnan Province, located in the tropical south of China. We got to get on the train, escaping freezing Beijing weather and get off to a temperature of 70 degrees. Again, I wore flip flops. Life was good. Almost every night of that trip was spent in a clean hotel with decent wifi, which was a surprise to us all. We expected to spend many of those nights in a hut with dirt floors, for some reason. We did, however, spend two nights in rural villages with populated with minority groups, but even then, their houses were very clean and bathrooms sanitary. Our tour guide was an adorable former monk named Xiaoai, and it was his first time being a tour guide. The first few nights of that trip was spent in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan. Kunming was just as, if not more, developed than Beijing. We visited a school for autistic children and, for APES, tested the water of the famous Green Lake, which was absolutely rampant with seagulls in a really pretty way, if you can imagine that. Xiaoai accidentally got us lost on the way to the lake and was very distraught and embarrassed, even though none of us minded. Ms. Turner got our her GPS and we found our way pretty quickly. 

The next city we visited was Jianshui, a smaller, livelier town several hours away from Kunming. There, we lounged around, drinking milkshakes and milk tea and tanned in the hotel's courtyard. It felt a bit like Hawaii but without the beaches, which was still incredibly relaxing. One day, Jing, Lily, and I were drinking smoothies outside when a white man walked past us and did a double take. "Oh my god. Foreigners!!" Turns out this guy had been living in an rural village a half hour away from Jianshui for the past two years and had only seen one other foreigner, his boss. He worked for Driscoll and was from Santa Cruz! It was pretty bizarre meeting the only foreigner within hundreds of miles and finding out he lived less than an hour away from Salinas and worked in the produce industry. The saying "small world" has never been more accurate. The next trip was to the rural villages. We had to hike for three hours in order to get to the villages, and it was nothing short of miserable. Curse the nine injured/sick people who didn't have to make the grueling trip up the mountain. The torture was worth it, as we all had an experience like never before. We spent two nights with a family of farmers, where we slept on mattresses on top of wooden floors and ate dinner in stools one foot above the ground. The villages threw us a party, where the women performed traditional dances as we rather unsuccessfully tried to learn the moves. 

After the villages, we went to Xishuangbanna, Banna for short, a small, lively city an hour away. The hotel there was our favorite hotel, as there were tons of amazing restaurants around the area and even a swimming pool. In Banna, we went to a local school where the students were completely different from Erfuzhong students. We sat through their classes, and they told us that if it weren’t for us coming, they would have been asleep through their lessons. They treated us to lunch and invited us to parties that they were having after school, on a weekday. Tons of the girls flirted with SYA guys, and several of the guys got proposed to. Upon adding several of these students on WeChat, I noticed that many of them had posted pictures of us, both ones that we took with them, and ones that they took from our own profiles. It was a bizarre and entertaining experience, and I don’t think I will ever meet students like them anywhere else in the world. 

Following our lovely stay in Banna, it was time to go home. We tearfully had our last Dicos (basically a knockoff KFC chain that is everywhere in China but Beijing. We fueled ourselves on this restaurant throughout the whole trip), and bought instant noodles for the plane ride, much to Li Laoshi’s protests. Apparently Chinese people don’t like it if you eat instant noodles in public places because of the odor, so the good 30 or so of us probably didn’t exactly make a good impression on the people on the plane ride home. Overall, it was a trip to remember. We got on each other’s nerves, made memories with one another and with those that we met, and were able to take two and a half weeks off of school in the tropics. Still, nothing beat the feeling of home Beijing gave us when we got off that plane and smelled the pollution.