The Real China
(Today I'm starting to post English for a change, so my foreign friends can read it too)
Well, it's been quite a week... (talking about last week - it took me a few days to create this post)
The short version: last week, from Monday to Friday, we went to the Yunnan province in China and visited the capital city Kunming and a small rural village called Keyi, to do research on the people and their environment.
If you wanna skip right to the pictures… I have put them on a different website. To see them, go here: http://temporaryexpatrick.myphotoalbum.com/ I got some video as well! Below you will only find a few images.
And now the long version...
On Monday, we departed from the beautiful Hong Kong International Airport (voted Best Airport in the World for 5 years in a row!) to Kunming, the capital city of the province Yunnan, in China. I expected to fly in a really small and old airplane, but it was actually quite modern and not so small. Food wasn't great, though.
A few hours later we arrived at Kunming Int'l Airport. Maybe you've never heard of Kunming (I hadn't, before I started this project), but it's actually a huge city! It has about 5 million inhabitants. Yunnan in total has around 43 million! A small bus brought us to the city, first to drop off the tutors at their hotel. You should have seen this place... it was probably the most luxurious and expensive hotel in the city!
How different from the hotel where the students were staying... Well, actually it wasn't bad at all... In fact, the Kunming University Hotel was a pretty good hotel, better than the one we are staying at in HK. We had our own bathroom! After settling there, we visited the school of design at the Kunming University, where they teach all kinds of design except industrial design. Still, I was surprised about the good facilities they have there... One roomed was completely filled with a lot of Mac workstations, G4 I think. Not bad.
Next morning we drove to the village of Keyi by the same bus, took about 2.5 hours. The roads weren't as bad as I though they would be. A bit bumpy sometimes though, especially the last part. On arrival near Keyi we were welcomed at the village gate by the villagers, dressed in traditional clothing. We had to participate in their ritual, meaning we jumped over a small fire, during which the woman were singing in their native language while men were performing some kind of dance... very special.
OK, at this rate I'm gonna write a whole book, so I'll speed things up a bit.
So, in the village we stayed in someone's home for two nights, it was very nice and tidy, much less primitive than I expected, though the toilet was a hole in the ground, in a small 'building' outside... interesting if you have to go in the middle of the night. The purpose of our stay in the village was to study the people and their culture; their products, their customs, traditions, skills, etcetera, so that now we can develop products for them that they can produce themselves and sell for export, such as textiles or wooden handicraft.
We interviewed people (with the Chinese students as translators), observed everything; took a lot of photos and video. My group went out to the fields to see what kinds of crops the people grow their. It was mainly tobacco, which Yunnan is well known for. About 90 percent of the village families grow tobacco, which is mostly sold to a Chinese cigarette company. Every day we ate in the village 'central building' at small tables and low seats. Everything we ate was locally grown, like the meat from the pigs, brown beans, walnuts, vegetables, eggs, potatoes. It was quite tasty. During each meal, the villagers would come up to each table, dressed in traditional clothing and bring out a toast to us, drinking their locally brewed 'firewater' (some sort of very alcoholic ricewine), after which they sang beautifully in their native language (not Chinese). They did this three times at each meal, for each table!
Some photos of the village:
For more, go here
All the houses in the village were very simple and poor buildings but surprisingly they had a very large and relatively new primary school building. Apparently that was sponsored by some rich guy. On the basketball field outside the school we played a basketball game against the villagers. It was a big event, all the school children came to watch and there were even a reporter and photographer from the local press to witness! You would think that the tall Europeans would easily beat those short Chinese, but nothing was less true! They were really good! Great fun, nonetheless.
On the last night, the villagers gave us a big show, with singing, dancing and music, which was so cool to see. Also, in return, we had to perform something. We (the Dutch group) sang Sinterklaas songs to them. Really silly of course, but I think they liked it. The big finale was a fire ritual, where we would all dance together with the villagers in a large circle around a big fire, with music and singing. That was unique, I will never forget. We just kept dancing around the fire till it was almost out.
The next day, on thursday, we drove back to Kunming via a touristic place called 'The Stone Forest', which is a natural wonder; very typically shaped stones, very beautiful. Finally the weather got nice that day, before it was all cloudy and rainy (but also a bit cool, so you dont sweat too much, which is good, cause we couldn't take showers in the village) Before we went back to the hotel in Kunming, we stopped by some shop selling silk products. We didn't really wanted to go there, but we had no choice, because we had a tour guide with us, who joined us at the Stone Forest, and she insisted that we take a look in the shop. I guess that's the way it goes in a communist country... After this short stop we went to a museum in Kunming, where we saw all kinds of traditional clothing and artifacts of the people of Yunnan, for our research. On the last night in Kunming we bought some souvenirs and had dinner in a restaurant, where we ate and drank for only 10 yuan (= 1 euro) per person! Amazingly cheap and the food was pretty good. Afterwards we went to a bar, where we were served big bottles of Chinese beer with tiny glasses! Apparently they didn’t have enough regular glasses for the whole group, so they just gave everyone a shot glass. To finish this great week, some of us went to a karaoke bar where we had great fun singing. I did 'End of the Road' of Boyz II Men of course...
Next day (friday) we flew back to a rainy Hong Kong.
In the weekend I did some relaxing, walking through the city and saw a movie (X-Men 3, pretty cool).
And that was my week…
