"Welcome to China. We have walnut milk." - Chinese people

Everybody goes home on Chinese New Year. The shops all close, the cities empty of the large portion of their residents who come from the country, and the trains fill up to standing room only. Luckily, my friend Diana invited me to go stay with her family in Kaiyuan for the holiday, saving me from two weeks in a post-apocalyptic Chengdu. Kaiyuan is in Yunnan province, which is just south of Sichuan. The city is a four-hour drive from Kunming, the capital, and this is where we landed when we flew there two weeks ago. Despite being next to each other, Sichuan and Yunnan's climates are completely opposite (at least the parts I've seen). Chengdu is in a basin, and in the winter it is pretty much continuously grey, clammy, and just above freezing. Yunnan, on the other hand, is hot, and because it's on a high plateau the air is dry. It makes me think of southern California.

We took a taxi and got to the bus station around 4 o'clock, and bought tickets for a bus two hours later. The station was crowded but not overwhelming, and we only had to wait about 15 minutes in line at one of the dozen ticket windows. We were both pretty hungry and there was a cafeteria, but all they were serving were some elderly-looking noodles, and we couldn't find a table that hadn't already been occupied by flies. So we went to the convenience store instead, and bought some pistachios, sunflower seeds, peanuts, desiccated date cake, spicy papaya, and bottled tea, and then sat outside in the bright afternoon sun.








The Greyhound-style bus was pretty poorly kept, none of the overhead lights worked (which after the sun set turned out to be a bummer), and the windows rattled so loudly when we hit bumps in the road that I was afraid they might shatter. But the bus was also mostly empty, and so the ride was pretty comfortable. While there was still light I just watched the changing iron-red hills and the weird, skinny trees with tufts of needle-like leaves at the top and in the middle, cracking sunflower seeds and throwing the shells out the window. I've read several times that in China, every square meter of arable land is under cultivation, and whenever I go outside of the city this seems to be true. What from a distance look like gradually sloping hills with wild vegetation turn out to be terraced garden plots, crisscrossed with raised mud walkways.

We got to Kaiyuan around 10 o'clock. By China's standards, Kaiyuan is a small town, mostly organized around the axis of one main arterial. Diana's apartment is on the arterial, but a few miles north of the town center. Her mom had cooked a late dinner for us, including stir-fried potato slivers, cabbage, and spicy pickled garlic cloves. Diana's family was extremely welcoming, hospitable, and generous. They graciously accommodated my vegetarian preferences, gave me my own room, included me in all of the various family and extended family outings, and when we left her mom sent me back with a big jar of homemade "rose sugar", which as far as I can tell is made of rose petals preserved with sugar--an exotic take on the fruit jam idea.

Two days after arriving, I took the bus back to Kunming for a couple days to see my friend, Z____, who happened to be traveling through. This time the bus ride was in the morning, and I got to see a completely new stretch of land, which we'd only passed after dark the day before. The land was mostly red, flat farmland with hills in the distance. Every once in a while, at a gas station, there would be a few guards or officials sitting under a cinderblock shelter, with more cinderblocks to hold down the plastic roof. Along the road there were also villages, which mostly comprised crumbling, faded brick single-story houses of indeterminate age. Sticking out amid these humble, handmade dwellings, there would sometimes be another kind of house--new, wooden, tall, and boxy, often painted garish pink or green, with a new car in the cement driveway. This sometimes created the appearance of a Malibu beach house that had been air-dropped into the middle of a medieval village.

Whenever our bus passed another car--which was about once every three minutes--the driver would lean into his horn before swerving into the opposite lane, sometimes swerving back just in time to avoid oncoming traffic. Once or twice, when the roads were crowded, this "passing lane" would grow to two or three lanes wide--as drivers who felt that other cars in the middle of passing weren't passing fast enough proceeded to pass them--and it felt like a miracle when we got back into our (single) lane without getting into a head-on collision. The bus was also full this time, and although the wind was strong I kept the window open because at any given moment it seemed like half the passengers were smoking. One man had a tattoo of a swastika on his hand, but I assume the direction was a mistake.

The eastern bus station in Kunming is pretty far from the city center, and it was a little bit challenging figuring out which buses to take. A few times I got what seemed like contradictory information from different people. On one of the buses there was a girl sitting behind a big, cardboard box, which was tied shut with straps. In the middle of the ride the box started crowing.

Kunming is smaller (and cheaper) than Chengdu, but it also seems to have a higher proportion of foreigners. There is one street in particular that hosts a whole plethora (really, an entire, honest-to-Kant plethora) of Western restaurants. On Wednesday morning we went to a French cafe called French Cafe, where we had a chocolate crepe, a strawberry tart, and panini. A happy man tried to sell us a jar of honey through the window.








Then we went to a farmer's market down the street, where I bought a wedge of goat cheese to take back to Kaiyuan. (I was also planning to buy several more wedges at the request of some friends in Chengdu when we passed back through the following week on the way to the airport, but on that day the cheese stall turned out to be closed, since it was only a couple days after New Year's.) The market and cafe are also right next to a beautiful park of walkways, bridges, gardens, and lakes, filled to the brim with dapper old men (the park, not the lakes). One common phenomenon in parks in China is a group of old ladies dancing. These are often traditional folk dances where everyone does the same thing at the same time. In this park on this day there was a particularly large group of dancers, and not all of them were old ladies.











After the park we went to a bakery and bought a green tea-flavored roll thing, but half an hour later we were accosted by three children begging for food. After making them promise to share it, we gave them the roll, but the kid we handed it to ran away, and the other two kept following us asking for food. For some reason, poverty is much more conspicuous in Kunming than it is in Chengdu. Kunming seems to have a higher number of people begging, a lot of whom are missing limbs or are otherwise mutilated--this it has in common with Hong Kong. I saw a few of these doing calligraphy with brushes held between their toes. Another phenomenon that seems to exist in Kunming but not Chengdu is performing or begging children. Every other corner had a child or two singing with a cheap, little microphone and amplifier, and none of the children looked very happy to be doing it.

Walking through the center of the city, we came to a little plaza, on either side of which was a line of old people in white lab coats. Each one was standing behind an office chair. The men and women in the coats didn't look at us as we walked passed, but seemed to be gazing benignly into the walls of the buildings across the street. I wondered if a chemical lab nearby was having an emergency evacuation (and was going to great lengths to ensure each staff member would still have a place to sit...), until a woman passing by sat down in one of the chairs and the scientist behind it started giving her a shoulder rub.

Z____ had been teasing me for being so fascinated by the old men in the park earlier, and when we passed a table selling "old man hats", I started trying some on. I was surprised to find one that I actually liked, and I asked how much it was.
"160 kuai," the lady said. I thanked her and started walking away.
"Don't you want that hat?" Z____ asked. "You have to bargain!"
"There's no way I can get it down to a price I'd be willing to pay," I said.
"Those hats should be 50 kuai at most," said Z____.
"But she wanted 160! She'd be insulted if I asked for 50."
But Z____ assured me this was not the case, so I walked back and made the offer, trying to sound jaunty. The lady laughed and shook her head, saying she couldn't possibly go below 100.
We started walking away again, when the lady called out after us "Ok! 60!"
Z____ replied "We'll take it for 50!"
"Well, in that case..." the lady conceded, and that is how I became the owner of an old man hat.




Me and Diana with bananas and hat


It seems like there is always one movie that must be mentioned immediately whenever anyone talks about movies here. When I first arrived it was 2012. For the past month or so it's been Avatar. In Kunming I finally saw it (in 3D...golly!). This was also my first experience going to a movie theater in China. We arrived two minutes after the nominal start of the movie, just in time to find out that it would be shown dubbed in Chinese with no subtitles! But since I was more interested in the animation than the dialogue, this didn't stop me from enjoying the film. When we entered the theatre, the lights hadn't yet been turned off, and a lot of people were still chatting. There was a picture of a space station on the screen, which I guessed was some kind of promotional preview, maybe for Avatar: The Game, or Avatar: The Theme Park Ride. We found our seats and I turned to Z____ to say something, but noticed that she seemed strangely engrossed in the preview. I looked around at all the people talking to each other but watching the screen, and then realized that there were no previews. The movie had started. There was a pretty steady stream of conversation going on around us through at least the first hour of the movie, but since I couldn't really understand it it was easier to tune out.

I'm writing this sitting by the window in a bakery, and there's a group of kids setting off fireworks right outside. They light a firework in their hands, and when it starts popping and shooting sparks everywhere they throw it on the ground and play soccer with it. One of them was standing by the window earlier staring at my laptop, and when I looked at him he grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.

The next night we ended up going to a movie bar, which I believe was called "Movie Bar 1895". They advertised as having live music and old movies. We had a hard time finding it and had to call three times for directions, but when we finally made it the waitress greeted us as if we were distinguished and anticipated guests. The bar had a PA, a piano, and several guitars, but the live music that night turned out to be a middle-aged woman singing movie theme songs over Music Minus One. Around 10:30 the woman left and the staff lowered a projector screen over the stage. The staff hadn't yet decided which movie to show that night, so they gave us their DVD album. We suggested 8 1/2, but were dismayed when they started the movie without turning off the lively Latin music playing over the PA. "Most of the customers here don't want to watch the movie, so we have to leave the music on" was the explanation. Looking around at the group of Chinese people playing cards, the white guy with his laptop, and the couple enjoying a romantic evening in the corner, I realized they had a point--none of them seemed too interested in watching a Fellini movie. We watched it with subtitles for about half an hour, and I laughed a couple of times imagining that the Latin music was the movie's soundtrack, and then we left.

I was hungry after that so we went to a sort of food court where we'd been the day before. Yunnan is known as having a large number of ethnicities (as recognized by the government), and each restaurant in the food court represented the food of a different one of these ethnic groups. This time it was late when we arrived, however, and most of the places were closed. Also unlike last time, the food court was ridiculously filthy. Pools of water and other liquids lay on the floor with paper plates, napkins, leftover food, trash, and plastic mats and buckets. The tables weren't much better. We were wading through this, looking for a place with that magic combination of openness and cleanliness. As we were walking, a scrawny young man suddenly jumped in front of us and started shouting "Eat! eat!" and making weird growling noises and miming someone shoveling food into their mouths. We ignored him and walked past, but soon realized that this was the only truly open restaurant. For a while the guy--who was actually a waiter--would come around and shout something at us, but we kept ignoring him and eventually he stopped. We ordered a famous Yunnan dish called "across the bridge noodles", which are rice noodles in a big bowl of hot, oily soup, with mushrooms and vegetables that you add at the table and that you hope will be sufficiently cooked by the hot broth. I made sure with the waitress that the soup had no meat in it and also no meat in the broth, but in retrospect I'm almost sure that it was chicken broth.

An hour later in the hotel room my stomach started hurting; over the course of the night things deteriorated until by morning I had completely rid my digestive system of all traces of food--past, present, and future--using all means at my disposal. The next day I had a fever and couldn't hold down anything but bread and water. This was also the day when I was supposed to take the bus back to Kaiyuan. But I'll save that story for another time.

While we were walking around in Kunming, Z____ and I entered a convenience store to buy some water when a little glass bottle with a green and white label caught my attention. The picture on the label looked like a big walnut. And lo...walnut milk it was. I had never noticed walnut milk before, but after that of course I started seeing it--and advertisements for it--everywhere. The walnut milk consisted of nothing but walnuts, sugar, water, and sometimes an emulsifier. I was so excited I bought three different brands and wrote reviews of them. I have never seen walnut milk in the U.S.--does it exist there?

Another place we went was "lady street" (女人街), which is not a red light district, but a big shopping mall that caters only to women (I know, what a strange concept). The mall was a lot like those malls in Taipei where each floor is a ring of tiny shops organized around a central escalator. We went down to the basement and saw what I think can best be described as a "manicure warehouse": rows and rows of tables and easy chairs with women getting manicures, pedicures, and a few massages, stretching as far as the eye could see (more or less).

Finally, I would like to mention a clothing store bravely called Unsightly & Peculiar, and a restaurant called My Favor Restaurant with, underneath this in big letters, the subtitle My Favor Steak. That's all.