Yup...It's my ultimate dream city

Hong Kong island as viewed from the Star Ferry
The Star Ferry....the most picturesque 10-minute crossing between Kowloon and HK Island
Busy busy.....it's not just me that loves HK....look at all of these peoples!
Me and Jenny on the Star Ferry looking all fresh and ready for adventure.....12 hours later we would look much more tired, and yet totally content with our first of many HK Saturdays (the first picture was zoomed waaaay in and only got our nostrils, but alas I am getting better at this 'taking pictures of myself' type photography)

Hmmm, so it's been awhile since I've posted.....what has been going on? Well....it is the week before Halloween in Shenzhen and you must know what that means...Halloween lessons for the kiddos...ergo...I go to class armed with A) music such as the theme to Ghostbusters and the Monster Mash, B) pictures of crazy foreigners in costumes like Genie from Aladdin or Elvis or a Pirate girl...even costumes for dogs...zorro dog, cowboy etc. C)worksheets with Halloween vocabulary and most importantly D) CANDY and voila! the week is destined to go well. I've been using the second half of all of my classes to have my students make up their own Halloween costume shops replete with name, goods, prices and a drawing of their best-selling product. The boys seem to think that "rubbish shop" or "rubbish clothes" are terribly appropriate for Halloween. I even had some clever girls make up an edible costume shop where the blood is spaghetti sauce, hair is made of liver, and a ghost costume is made entirely of meat....creative but ultimately....gross.

Life in Shenzhen is at a lull right now....November is nearing, the weather is cooling, students are prepping for midterms. Everything seems pretty routine, until........

I added Hong Kong to the mix. I know know exactly where I want to live after I finish law school. See, Hong Kong is a blend of my two favourite aspects of the world: London and the East. Hong Kong is essentially the eastern version of London and I love it I love it I love it. In Shenzhen, no one offers you help, in fact, you're much more likely to get spat upon than to ever get help from anyone. But in Hong Kong, the two times that Jenny and I pulled out my map to figure out how to get to our next destination....people promptly came up to us and asked us how they could help. And these weren't foreigners, they were Hong Kong people....so wonderful. And while i'm on the topic of foreigners, for the first time since Beijing, I wasn't stared at all day long, in fact I wasn't stared at all b/c there are people from literally all over the world living in HK. In addition, not everyone there is aenorexic looking like they are in Shenzhen, people actually come in all shapes and sizes, lovely! Plus....I swear that everyone in HK is gorgeous...maybe the friendly demeanor heightens this plausibility, but seriously, compared with Shenzhen...oh wait, you can't compare. In Hong Kong you can buy diet 7up....amazing. In fact, for prices slightly less than what they are in the US, you can get pretty much anything western....which is cool. However, since I'm paid in Chinese rmb....I feel very poor in HK. Also....they've got English bookshops, with English newspapers and magazines....it was like Christmas taking the South China Morning Post and the latest copy of the Economist back with me across the border.

Speaking of the border....I went through customs and immigration twice in one day in order to get in and out of HK. On my way out of China and into HK, the immigration officer didn't think I was me, and had his friend come look at my passport, made me sign my name twice...it was kinda funny b/c that's never happened before. My day trip into HK added 6, yes 6 passport stamps into my passport....no wonder people have to get additional pages in their passports so often here. It's actually not all that pricey to actually get onto HK Island from China. It's about $33HK which is a little less tha $4.50 each way on the lightrail. It takes about 35 minutes once you cross the border to get into Kowloon. The border crossing is what takes time....maybe 45 minutes or so, b/c you have to a) leave China and then b) enter HK.

Jenny and I just spent the day poking about Central and Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island, really just trying to get our bearings. We joked that we were seeing HK 'one bookstore at a time' b/c our English word-starved brains were craving new books and we thus sought out 3 or 4 different bookstores in our 12 hour day on the island. We also went to Victoria Park...where all big things public happen, and rode the Star ferry across the harbour from Kowloon. Unfortunately the day was hazy and so pictures, the few I took, came out terribly sub-par. We decided to save the trip up Victoria's Peak for another weekend b/c of the haze. Never fear.....if I can be frugal during the week....there will be many, many, more trips to HK. Especially since you can buy cheese there, and cheese in my favorite form...with tomatoes and basil on a baguette...mmmmmmm, yum. Plus there are limitless museums to see, and even some very interesting sounding temples.

In short....if anyone can procure me a job in HK for the indefinite future; I would love you forever and ever.

Say "Qiezi"

This picture is from our last day at Beida (Beijing University). Meredith and I were wanted for photos by the lake.....the children were soooo adorable. In China, you don't say 'cheese' when you're about to have a photo...you say 'qiezi' which sounds like 'chee-aaaaa-zuh' which is eggplant in Chinese. Awesome.

It was the cheese, the violins, the bargaining for the mini-bus....that's how I fell in love

Gorgeous and serene Huating Temple. If I ever decide to become a monk, you'll find me here.

Sword Peak Pond in the Stone Forest
After dark the Stone Forest is more like an Enchanted Forest. We stopped at the top here to play a round of Euchre and enjoy the scenery.
The cradle of life, ha, no not really. This is in the Stone Forest. We crawled on our hands and knees over precarious high rock passes to get to this 'secret' spot that few others know of. However we had to wait our turn to get photos, as we began to realize that it wasn't so secret, just dangerous and dangerous doesn't deter many apparently.

Here is me on the Heavenly Platform....carved into a mountain and most precarioulsy perched over Dianchi lake, a lake that looks lovely until the sun shines upon it and then it bears an uncanny resemblance to a nuclear waste dump with its radioactive green color. Oh yeah and just to my left was a clever little girl who dropped her pants and pooped in the corner.....yes, that is very typical 'round here.

The night we learned to play euchre....oh yeah and the night I learned to eat sunflower seeds (but I refuse to crack them in my mouth, and really they're too much work to be worth eating....but at the Western Hills, there were vendors selling the whole sunflower top with the seeds in it, so if you're in to the sunflower seed deal and really like the prospect of fresh off the flower seeds, then you had better hop on over to China quick)

The East Pagoda....we later found the West Pagoda to be more beautiful, despite what our trusty Lonely Planet Guide had to say.

Our two-story garage restaurant
The infamous goat-cheese that we ooooooed and ahhhhhhed over

Hmmmk. It's Sunday night and I've just gotten through teaching both weekend days and I've got five more weekdays to go before I get another break....holidays don't come pain-free around here. But I might reiterate that Kunming was more than worth a little 7-day work week pain. What's so great about Kunming?
1) It's the city of Eternal Spring - what cannot be great about that? 65 degree days and 50 degree nights....that's 30 whole degrees cooler than the sauna I am living in now.

2) The people. Everyone was just downright pleasant in Kunming. We walked down the street one morning and an old man was pedaling a bicycle down the road with his wife in a side-car attached to the bike. How often does that happen anywhere else? What about a man pedaling down the road with a bunch of about 100 balloons trailing behind him on his bike? If you want one, just flag him down. Shoe shiners set up work on street corners, next to men who make fresh kettle corn, who park next to the peoples making satay and fried tofu, and steamed yams, and boiled corn. Then at night a particular group of men come out with their special granola to sell, that is truly irresistible. Then after you've had enough food.....men on street corners make animals out of banana leaves to buy for 60 cents.

3) I was obsessed with churches when we lived in London; here I am in love with temples. The fact that there are temples means that there is religion in Kunming...not so much so in Shenzhen. We must have seen four or five temples during our short stay in Kunming, and while I loved them all....I fell in love with one. Huating temple, about half way down the Western Hills Mountain was the most beautiful temple I have ever seen. It was absolutely serene....carved into a crevice in the mountain, impeccably well-kept....it was perfect. There were six or seven buildings that surrounded a little pond where fish swam and turtles...well they sunbathed. It almost made me want to live in solitude right there with the monks for awhile...think about how many books I could read, or scarves I could knit :-)

4) Speaking of books.....we went to a most excellent English book store in the university district. In the Let's Go guidebook it was written up as the "most eclectic" variety of books you'll ever find in China and the shop didn't disappoint. After me having asked two different chinese people to direct us to the particular road....we found it. On the second floor of a tiny shop, English books, both old and new, fiction and non-fiction, classics and self-help, were stacked from floor to ceiling. It was amazing. The books were priced relatively close to their US price, as they were imported, but I found them all compelling enough to but two...and let me tell ya, it was hard to narrow it down. Henry James and Hua Guixin won out in the end, the latter actually being a banned book in this country.

5) Green Jade Lake Park was magnificant. Okay, there might be parks as beautiful in Europe or America, but the park "culture" was unparalleled. On this particular Saturday, in addition to other touristy people and families etc, there were violin players, erhu players (two-string intrstrument), ballroom dancers, multiple pagodas by the lakes filled with impromptu opera singing groups, fish feeding frenzies, children chasing bubbles blown by parents, and some serious games of majon going on. It was a captivating experience no doubt.

6) Where else in the world can intructions like "take the number 6 bus to the end of the line, switch to the 5, take it to the end, get out and catch a minibus" lead to a monumental adventure? This was how we got to the bamboo temple. As soon as we got off that #5 bus, we were bombarded with ladies holding signs with various locations listed in Chinese. Luckily I had looked up the words we needed for the temple and was able to negotiate with a lady in a Little House on the Prarie-type bonnet. She and her husband agreed to drive us the 30 minutes there, wait for us and then take us home for 50 kuai......about 4.50. We figured that was a bit steep...but it looked like it was about to rain and we didn't want to risk being at the bamboo temple indefinetly. The return back to the #5 bus lot proved wonderful too...I got one of the tastiest baozi (bread dumpling) for lunch that I have ever had....all for the pricey total of 7 cents...can't beat that. I also bought some delicious apples.

7) Cheese takes on a whole new meaning in this city. In China....cheese is really not a common commodity..actually in Shenzhen it really can't be found in the store unless you want to buy imported stuff. But....in Kunming they are known for Ru bing, or goat cheese. Man is it tastey. So tastey that the two-story garage restaurant by the eclectic book shop was visited by us twice while we were in the city b/c it's fried goat cheese and stir-fried beef was sooooo good. Mmmm. The first time we ate outside..the second time, we were ushered to the second story of the garage where I had to duck up the stairs and duck to get to our midget-sized table. We were served tea in tin cups....think what prisoners clank on the bars when they want to be served their food :-)

8) I learned to play Euchre. One night, while we drank our case of Snow beer under an umbrella-ed table by the river, while we no doubt entertained all Chinese parties around us, Tim taught us ladies how to play Euchre...and it was all downhill from there. From then on, whenever there was an idle moment, whether it was in our hostel room, or at the Stone forest sitting amongst enchanted trees after dark, or on the train bunks on our way back to Shenzhen....we were playing Euchre. I cannot say that I have any skill, but what I lack in skill I make up for in enthusiam. I think Jenny and I are addicts now, and we made Julia play, b/c four people is compulsory for the game to work....I don't think she shares our crazy passion.

9) The Stone Forest was way more than just a rock garden.....it was downright beautiful. Us ladies found ourselves chasing after Tim all afternoon as we climbed up countless stairs, climbed down into secret passages and took sport in getting lost over and over again.

.....basically I cannot put into words what I beautiful and perfect place this is. Anyone reading this really just needs to see it for themselves...and quick!

*More pictures to come...the ones above are truly random..but blogspot is being difficult at the moment.

Do you believe in love at first sight......for a city???

Hmmm, so in the past when I said that "I love China" I really had no idea how much more I could love China. what this past week in Kunming taught me is that I do not love Shenzhen, but I love China and especially the China that is reflected in the city of Kunming. Friday Sept. 30 I sprinted out of the gates of school after a confusing morning of where I was told another teacher would pick up my last classes because I taught 2 full 60 person classes in the morning due to lack of a spare room to split the classes, only one foreign teacher was needed per class. Well in paranoid Kristen fashion, I waited around until the last classes were to start to make sure Barbara showed up in the room as discussed to teach the students. I waited and even after the final bell had rung, she wasn't there. Thus, even though my brain had already departed from work mode and was sailing into vacation mode, I taught two more classes, as per usual.

I then ran home just before noon, jumped into my jeans, tied my sweatshirt around my waist, picked up my hiking backpack and set off for downtown to complete my mission of procuring the last missing piece of my vacation necessities.....the passport. Yes I realize this is an incredibly tight time frame, but there was no other way. The Bureau had only returned the passports on Thursday and I could not go and pick them up that afternoon b/c I had a 'surprise' English Corner that never actually took place, funny how that works, TIC. Hmm, so I get on the bus, hop off downtown, walk 25 minutes (closest bus stop) to where we meet for Chinese class on Fridays and pick up the passports of the 4 members of the Kunming travelling group aka the smartest people in the world b/c we picked the best city in the world to travel to. At this point I was sweating b/c I was wearing 100 times too many clothes for 95 degree weather, but this was how I needed to dress for the forthcoming city....plus I didn't have room in my backpack for jeans and a sweatshirt. It was really a matter of space. I raced back down to the main downtown street, hopped on a subway and headed out west to meet Jenny, Julia and Tim by 2:30. We then caught a bus from Windows of the World (Epcot Center-like theme park in Nanshan) up to Bao'an district, where the airport is. We arrived in plenty of time. In fact, we couldn't even check in yet. That gave us plenty of time to procure a snack...for Jenny and me it was a Diet Coke and Mentos (my new sin of the moment....they're sooo addictive...esp. the red-orange kind).

When we finally got up to the counter, people were shoving in front of us, apparently we were throwing enough elbows. The man at the ticket counter couldn't find Tim or Julia's reservation and so all four of us were pointed over to another counter. Minor panic among us ensues.....we just want out of town...yeesh! After talking to another lady it is found that their names were put in backwards and the man was looking up their first name and not their last. It was all straigthened out, but it led me to think....what kind of nut job is working at the counter such that he doesn't think to try flipping the name order around, esp. when we had paper tickets and proof of reservation. Hmm, whatever. The Shenzhen airport is rather nice and I was surprised to learn that South Eastern China Airlines actually flies to Paris from Shenzhen. The flight was really one of my most pleasant flying experiences I think I've ever had, and I'm honestly not exaggerating. The plane was well kept, instructions were in english and chinese, the dinner served was actually much better than what i am served at school....what more could I have asked for? Nothing you say? Oh but there was more. When we were about to land, the flight cadets (that's what they're called here) passed out free duffel/shoulder bags with the airline logo on them. These were perfect, I mean totally perfect for us psuedo-backpackers, who by the end of the week had acquired more stuff than we had space for. Thus, last night on the train home from Guangzhou, four tired, slightly dirty (30 hour trains will do that) foreign teachers could be found toting the Eastern China Airlines bag. Even more funny was that the fellow in the bunk across from me on the from Kunming to Guangzhou had the very same airline bag with him.

Ok, back to the beginning of the trip. Upon arrival in Kunming we had to shove our way through the arrival hall and the people who thought it appropriate to walk -2 miles/hr in a zigzag fashion out of the airport and hold up all pedestrian traffic. The taxi driver understood my Chinese and in a mere 10 minutes we were at our hostel, which was attached to a hotel. The hostel was actually wonderful. The bunk beds were far better than anything I had at boarding school and except for the hard mattress would have been better than the ones in college. They were even extra long. So, for a mere $3.50 each per night, we had a room for four to ourselves for as long as we wanted. The showers we hot, there was even a dryer attached to the washing machine...and all the ladies working there spoke English. It was a huge backpackers hostel and while some were nice, there seems in general to be a mutual disdain between foreigners in China. It's like I should be the only one travelling in this country, not you. Haha, oh well. We live here. They don't. Oh back to the dryer comment. Julia and Jenny and I almost paid the 2kuai to wash our pants b/c in Shenzhen there is no way to shrink pants back into shape, everything is washed in cold water and hang-dried....thus pants and jeans just keep expanding and stop fitting. I think we ultimately forgot about that initial thought as we were enthralled immediately with the city.

As soon as we stepped off of the plane and onto the tarmac, we knew there was something wonderful about this city in Yunnan. The air was cool and crisp. Tim had made the thoughtful point that there is something great about not walking on a gateway to the airport and instead actually walking and placing your feet on the tarmac after getting off of the plane.....it makes you feel comfortable with the place you're visiting.

That first night, even though it was 9:30, we were all eager to explore. Since we were staying downtown, we decided to peruse the streets a bit. I was immediately struck by a huge difference between Shenzhen and Kunming. In Kunming there was a generation spread. There are old people in Kunming, and I don't mean people who would just qualify for AARP, but I mean 85, 90 year old couples walking around with the most pleasant of expressions on their faces. In Shenzhen, everyone is young....it's a city devoid of old people. In the parks at night in Kunming, people go dancing. There were vendors pushing carts of food standing at every corner. One could buy satay, fried potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes, peeled youzi, kettle corn, boiled corn and fried tofu from vendors near the park or the river that ran parallel to Qingnian road (yes we got to know all the streets of downtown in a mere matter of hours). As we walked along the river we saw little bars with groups of people huddled around umbrella-ed tables, drinking beer and playing cars. We vowed to do the same one of the nights we were there. In one of the parks, fountains were lit up with magnificant green lights. It took us all, oh maybe 20 minutes to fall head over heels for this southwestern China city.

....and after a week, the feeling didn't change. More to come.