Archives for July 2013
Three-Wheeled Addendum
July 16, 2013 by 1 Comment
When I was describing the three-wheeled vehicles of Yuxi recently, I forgot about this beauty:
Daytrip to Kunming
July 15, 2013 by 3 Comments
I spent Monday in Kunming, the city of 6.5 million people that lies about an hour north of Yuxi. I’d been there twice before, once when I first flew to China and again when I had my visa physical, but I’d never even started to explore the city. I wanted to do that–and to buy coffee.
Coffee is not popular in Yuxi. The local stores stock Nescafé instant, but buying either whole-bean or ground coffee is very difficult. I’d been drinking Yunnan Arabica, a very nice brew indeed, but the store I bought it from when I first moved here no longer stocks it. When I ran out on Sunday morning, I knew desperate measures were called for. Hence Kunming.
I rendezvoused with Owen and Matt, two of my new colleagues, at 9:00 in the morning and together we walked to the Yuxi bus station. There we arranged to take what is essentially an intercity taxi to Kunming for ¥55 (about $8.80) each.
The first order of business when we got there was to go to Salvador’s Coffee House, a well-known establishment in a part of town where there are many stores that cater to backpackers, college students, and Kunming’s expat population. We were here:
Salvador’s turned out to be a charming place that serves Mexican and American food, has a small lending library of English books, and sells its own coffee (which they ground for me on the spot). It also has sketchy plumbing, but Mr. T is there in the bathroom to help out.
We had lunch up in the loft, overlooking the front door.
I had spaghetti with meat sauce, my first American meal in almost four weeks. It was comforting to hear the burble of American-accented English again. Much as I didn’t come to China to hang out with expats, it seemed like an incredible luxury to be eating my native food in a familiar environment in the presence of other Americans.
After lunch, we went back to the center of Kunming so Matt and Owens could do some shopping. All three of us stand 6’1″ or taller and the stores in Yuxi simply don’t stock clothes that large. I sat down to rest while Matt went to the ATM.
Owen and Matt did find clothes that fit, though prices at the foreign stores they patronized were no lower than they would have been in the US or the UK.
Kunming is not a beautiful city, nor an easy one go get around in. There are throngs of people everywhere and transportation is hampered by a massive subway construction project that has much of the central city walled off, dug up, and rerouted. Many of the streets are closed to both automobiles and pedestrians on one side, which funnels both motorized and foot traffic into half the space the roads usually provide. It’s going to be great when you can zip around the city underground, but right now it is just chaos. With nowhere else to go, scooters, bicycles and motorcycles take to the sidewalks, further adding to the stress of simply walking down the street. Fortunately, I found respite in a nice shady pedestrian mall in the middle of the city, which was undoubtedly the prettiest part of town I saw.
Near this was an enormous residential and retail complex, a multi-level indoor/outdoor mall connected by multiple walkways to three 30-story apartment buildings. The mix of indoor and outdoor spaces was nice, though again the architecture and construction left me cold.
We all gorged ourselves with dinner at Papa John’s. This was the first pizza–in fact, it was the first cheese of any kind–I had eaten in almost four weeks. As Willy says, “The art of our necessities is strange / That can make vile things precious.” I’d have to review the text, but I’m not sure Lear had pizza in mind when he made that remark.
Pushing through the thousands of people going home at evening rush hour and stepping over open manholes, piles of sidewalk pavers, and construction debris, we made our way back to the bus station to catch an intercity taxi back to Yuxi. These cars hold a driver and four passengers and they don’t go unless they are full. The three of us got in and waited for a fourth passenger. A Chinese woman came up to the car and put her luggage in the trunk. Then she walked around the side of the car to get in, but changed her mind. Another Chinese woman approached and the same thing happened. The driver later told us that neither woman wanted to ride with three foreigners, though whether out of fear or embarrassment I could not tell. Finally a young Chinese man got in with us and off we went. We arrived back in Yuxi twelve hours after we’d left.
And this morning, I was once again able to enjoy my two morning cups of joe.
Wheels: Two and Three
July 12, 2013 by 5 Comments
Half the vehicles on the roads of Yuxi have two or three wheels. The vast majority of the two-wheeled variety are scooters and small motorcycles. Bicycles may have reigned supreme on Chinese streets forty years ago, but they are a tiny minority today in Yuxi.
Most of the scooters are electric. They whir by so quietly that they often take me by surprise.
By law, motorcycles can have an engine displacement of no more than 150cc. That’s tiny. The first photo below is of a mototaxi. They hang out at almost every intersection in town and will take you wherever you want to go in town for ¥5 (about $0.80). Note the two helmets: one for the driver, one for his passenger.
The most interesting and unusual vehicles here are the three-wheeled mini-trucks. These have a motorcycle front end and engine married to a flatbed. Some of them are electric. The carry everything from furniture to flowers. Some have coal-fired cookstoves on their backs and function as food carts.
There are still some of their pedal-powered forebears on the roads. They’re built to last. Note the three downtubes on this first one.
Rewind: My Journey Here
July 10, 2013 by 2 Comments
A couple of friends have suggested I write about my journey from Detroit to Kunming and the unexpected situation I found myself in upon arrival. I’m not sure it was particularly blogworthy, but by popular demand, here goes….
On June 19, I flew from Detroit direct to Shanghai on a Delta Boeing 777-200. Back in economy, we were all packed in like chocolates in a box, but without the pretty tissue paper. Flight time was fourteen and a half hours. I walked around and did knee bends every hour or so to keep the circulation going.
On arrival at Shanghai Pudong airport, immigration was routine. An official looked through my passport and my Chinese visa, took my picture, and stamped me into the People’s Republic. Customs were nonexistent as far as I was concerned; I simply followed the line of people with nothing to declare and walked right through without being searched or even questioned. The whole process was remarkably streamlined.
Since my connection to Kunming was a domestic flight on China Eastern under a code-share with Delta, I had to take a shuttle bus to the domestic departure terminal. I was a little surprised by the Shanghai airport. I expected something shiny and high-tech, like Hong Kong. This was not the case. In fact, the parts of the two terminals I saw had the ambiance of a bus station. That might be unfair; I was laden with two heavy suitcases, a heavy overnight bag, and a laptop, and consequently was unable to go exploring.
When my flight was called, the passengers were bused out to the tarmac where we boarded a very modern and nicely appointed Boeing 737-300. The flight to Kunming was three and a half hours. China is a big country. By way of perspective, Kunming is closer to Calcutta, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur, Rangoon, Singapore, Saigon, Bangkok, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, and Katmandu than it is to Shanghai.
The Kunming airport was impressive, new, and gracefully designed with a richness of materials that seemed to be lacking in Shanghai. It quickly became clear, however, that I had left the heavily-touristed cosmopolitan world where English is widely spoken as a second language. And though that was frustrating, it was also exactly what I wanted.
Due to a mix-up in the interpretation of my itinerary, a representative from the school I was to work was not at the Kunming airport to meet me. After two hours of waiting, by which time I had been awake for 36 hours straight, I succumbed to the importuning of a tout who promised a hotel room and transportation thereto for ¥188 (about $31). These arrangements were carried out almost completely in pantomime and via numbers tapped into cell phones. I was packaged into a van with a driver and three other touts. It was after 2:00 in the morning and everyone was going home for the day.
After we left the airport complex, the van turned onto an unlit road. There was nothing but scrub on both sides of us. The van stopped, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and for the first time I wondered if I had made a mistake: was I about to be robbed and dumped by the side of the road? However, one of the touts was merely getting out, presumably to go home. We continued on into what looked like a poor, tangled, hodgepodgey part of town, turned onto a narrow dead-end street, and finally pulled into a garage adjacent to the lobby of a small hotel. As I checked in, I picked up the hotel’s business card in hopes of figuring out just where exactly I was. No luck: the name of the hotel and the address were all written in Chinese.
The room was Spartan—certainly nothing like the picture the tout had shown me—but clean. The window had neither glass nor screen, just aluminum bars. I looked out onto the back of a neon sign advertising a KTV club (karaoke TV, a popular diversion here). I put off worrying about where I was and how I would get to Yuxi until morning and gratefully hit the bed.
When morning came, I was able to get in touch with the school in Yuxi. Since I had no idea where I was, we decided it would be best for me to return to the airport and be picked up there. While I waited for the van to fetch me, I stood in the lobby and watched the NBA finals on a flat screen TV with a young Chinese guy. We shared a few words of basketball. An older guy came into the lobby with a three-foot tall bong that appeared to have been made from soup cans. He stuffed the roach of a hand-rolled cigarette into the bowl and fired it up. I politely declined a hit.
The van took me back to the airport, where I was met by apologetic school officials. We rode south about fifty miles in a hired Volkswagen Santana to Yuxi, where I was checked into the Hongta Hotel. I stayed four nights in that large, modern, full-service business palace until I got my own apartment.
Looking back on it, that first experience in mainland China was a confidence-builder, despite the missed pick-up in Kunming. It taught me that I can get by here even without a common language, that by and large this is a safe country for travelers, and that even when things do go awry, I am resourceful enough to set them right.
The Musicians in Nie Er Park
July 6, 2013 by 9 Comments
Yuxi has generally stayed out of the way of history since its founding in 960 AD. No famous battles were fought here. Yuxi has never been a vital commercial or political city. One of its claims to fame, though, is that it is the home of the ancestors (though not the actual birthplace) of Nie Er, the composer of the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China, “March of the Volunteers.” There are a number of parks, streets, and memorials to him here. One of then, Nie Er Park, is right around the corner from my apartment. As befits a greenspace named after a musician, the park attracts many traditional Chinese musicians every day of the week, but especially on Saturday mornings. I spent a few hours there this morning.
The most interesting performers here were a 25-piece string orchestra with a vocalist. Considering that all these musicians are amateurs just out to play for the joy of it, I was impressed that they could actually get that many people together at one time. Unfortunately, the orchestra played in the round, which made getting a shot of the whole group frustrating, so I tended to focus on the individual musicians.
All the musicians in the park today were at least middle-aged, and most were older. This doesn’t seem so different to me than the situation in other cultures, where traditional musical forms are preserved by the older generation but ignored by the young.
A Walk Around Town
July 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Mondays and Tuesdays are my days off, my virtual weekends. I took advantage of that fact on Tuesday and took a walk from my apartment to the older part of town and back. Walking is my sole mode of transportation for now and I enjoy it always. Here are some of the sights I saw.
This is the Yuxi Museum, which is just down the street from my apartment. Haven’t been in there yet–maybe next Monday. 
I then headed south into the older part of the city. There is a temple there that is small but quite nice. 
There are other examples of classic Chinese architecture in this part of town.
This part of town has many blocks of older streets lined with one- and two-story retail shops. Given the rapid pace of urbanization here, I would not be surprised to return to Yuxi in four years and find much of this gone.
The walk back to my side of town took me through some of the nicest commercial streets in Yuxi.
Moving In
July 3, 2013 by 9 Comments
I now have a home in Yuxi, a two-bedroom one-bathroom semi-furnished apartment on the 18th floor of a brand-new 24-story high-rise. What’s more, I now have WiFi, which will put me back in communication with the outside world.
It wasn’t easy finding a place this size. Most of the apartments that are available here are in newer buildings and have three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Yes, it’s far easier to find a big apartment here than a small one. This may be because few people in Yuxi live alone—they live in family units, so there is a much larger supply of bigger apartments. And paradoxically, most of the smaller flats that do exist tend to be just as—or more—expensive than bigger ones. One explanation I heard for this is that smaller places tend to be leased by wealthy Chinese men looking for a screw pad or a place to stash a mistress. At any rate, I didn’t want to live in a three-bedroom place that would seem sad and empty for a whole year. I set out to locate cozier digs.
I found them in a three-tower complex on Hongta Dadao, the main street of downtown Yuxi, on an end where the large commercial buildings start to thin out. The place is still largely empty and construction is ongoing. I’d guess that the building is less than 10% occupied.
Just behind my building is an area of vintage China, with block after block of older low-rise apartment buildings housing convenience stores, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, foot massage parlors, and barbershops at street level. These establishments are generally open to the sidewalk and are fronted by roll-up security gates instead of doors and windows. I like this openness to the street. So many stores in the US seem to turn their backs on the surrounding city (e.g., Westgate in Toledo) or to moat themselves off from their surroundings with Acres of Free Parking. The configuration here invites passers-by into the shops and the shopkeepers onto the sidewalk. It gives the place more of a communal feel.
This is a friendly neighborhood. It took a few days and a determination on my part to smile, but people now regularly say hi or hello to me as I walk down the street. I am a definite novelty; by most estimates there are maybe twenty western expats living in this city of 1.5 million people. Across Hongta Dadao is a commercial market district lined with one-story buildings occupied by small businesses generally clustered by type. I’m closest to four square blocks of stores that sell doors, windows, tile, and other building materials and fixtures.
My apartment has a nice living/dining area that looks out through a large window onto the city and the mountains that mark the edge of the Tibetan highlands. I hope to place some nice cushions and pillows on the large window seat. It should be a great spot for hanging out, reading, working on my laptop, or just admiring the view.
My bedroom has a similar, though smaller, window seat. The bed is big enough, but the mattress is hard as a board. In fact, I think it IS a board. When I first saw the apartment and sat down on the bed, I said “Oh, there’s a box spring—now all I need is a mattress.” My boss, an old China hand, chuckled and said, “That IS the mattress.” I’m currently in the market for a thick quilt or comforter to soften it a bit.
The second bedroom is slightly smaller; I’m currently using it for storage and sorting. Neither bedroom has a closet—in fact, in a day and a half of apartment hunting last week, I never saw an apartment that had any closets at all.
The kitchen is a tiny and L-shaped, with low counters (for obvious ethno-anatomical reasons) and high cabinets (perfect for whacking my stupid American head against). Yuxi apartments like this do not have ovens, since Chinese cooking is generally done on a stovetop. I hope to find a countertop roaster so I can toast, bake and broil. I was lucky to find a coffeemaker—a real rarity here. My stove is single but powerful gas-fired burner with a ventilation hood over it. The gas is not plumbed in, but comes from a tank under the counter that will last about a month of regular use. When it’s empty, the gas company will bring me a new one. 
The short leg of the kitchen L morphs into my laundry area. I have a small washing machine (cold water only). I don’t have a dryer—another appliance that seems uncommon here. So far, though, I haven’t needed one. I set up a rack next to the window and hang my laundry there. The climate is such that it’s dry in half a day. 
I also keep my bottled water in that area—another deliveryman brings replacements when I run dry. The water bottles are carried on a 125 cc motorcycle that has a custom rack mounted on back that can hold eight of these five-gallon bottles.
That year-round spring-like climate accounts for the fact that my flat has neither heat nor air conditioning. So far, even though the days have been warmer than usual, with days in the mid-80s and nights in the mid-70s, I haven’t missed air conditioning at all. Eighteen floors up, the breezes coming in off the mountains through my screen windows keep the place very comfortable.
(PARENTAL ADVISORY: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF TOILET ISSUES AHEAD!)
My bathroom has some features that may strike some of my American friends as strange. 
There is no shower stall, just a shower fixture: the bathroom is truly a bath room. The toilet is not a western-style hopper, but a typical Asian porcelain hole in the floor, which doubles as the shower drain. Using such facilities requires one to place the feet on either side of the hole and squat down. This in turn requires supple hamstrings and something resembling a suspension of disbelief. After relieving oneself, the toilet is flushed in the usual (western) manner by pushing a lever or button on the toilet tank, which floods the porcelain trough with water.
There is no toilet paper holder in the bathroom, and so far I’ve been unable to find a freestanding one. Of course, given the configuration of the shower, a roll of toilet paper mounted almost anywhere would get soaked every time the shower was used. What’s more, Chinese toilet plumbing will rebel against the introduction of wads of toilet paper. I keep my toilet paper in under the sink, get it out only when it’s needed, and throw it in the garbage after using it.
What to make of all this? Herewith follows a digression on the Practical & Cultural Implications of the Chinese Bathrooms.
1) It’s not that the Chinese can’t manufacture western toilets; they can and do. It’s not that such toilets cost a lot more than Chinese toilets; they don’t. My conclusion is that folks here prefer the squat-and-shit models. Some say they’re better for your health, and I can attest that one can do one’s business on a Chinese toilet with a lot less huffing and puffing, so maybe it’s true.
2) This layout does allow for multitasking. Theoretically I could take a shower, shave, and pee all at the same time. Theoretically.
3) Squatting spreads the ass cheeks, while western toilet seats compress them. Then too, Chinese asses aren’t generally as fleshy as the American variety. Thus one simply stays cleaner when excreting and toilet paper is not as necessary.
4) For those not willing to wipe with one’s hand and then wash maniacally, carrying toilet paper is a good idea.
5) Hypothesis for further consideration: maybe Chinese people don’t eat as much crap we Americans do, so whatever inconveniences Asian toilets present aren’t as significant as they would be back in the States. Garbage in, garbage out.
6) The Chinese hole-in-the-floor toilets bring one closer to one’s own shit. Perhaps this is a vestige of the peasant pragmatism of much of the population and a greater comfort with the body and its functions.
Over the next few months, my challenge will be to make the place feel homier without spending much money. Being a new building, the place still feels soulless and very white. I’m only going to be here a year, so I don’t want to invest heavily in home décor, but I’m looking for ways to make it more welcoming.
