Classes begin

Classes began on September 10 here for all the foreigners who are studying Chinese. It has recently become a requirement that all beginning students must take at least 15 credit hours a semester so currently I am taking 15 credit hours of listening, Speaking, and Comprehensive with three different teachers which don't necessarily teach any of the above areas but they often switch. All of the teachers have been very helpful so far in the past 3 weeks of classes 2 of which are really nice and the third is a little bit more challenging... I will discuss the latter in more detail in the next post, when culture shock finally begins...

It is about a 20-30 minute walk to class which is probably pretty close to the same as last year at Liberty in comparison with the distance from East campus to Demoss.

However, it is a little bit different from walking on a bridge over a busy high way...

Half of the way is on the normal campus through the dorms and the cafeteria and the main class room buildings. Then the second half is on a dirt road through farm land. Once you get to the dirt road there is the sound of constant dynamite blasting as a bunch of construction is taking place at this end of the campus, which causes some humorous times in the middle of class...


At the end of the dirt road, as shown above, is the new foreigner branch of campus; which once was less than 2 minutes from most places on campus and now is a 20 minute walk separated from the rest of campus... This is also the area of my classroom as shown below.

In side on the left is my good friend from Thailand hes my only classmate who knows a little English. He is a medical doctor in his 40's who knows over seven languages and is studying the trade between different minorities in the area. Up front is one of five of my Korean classmates. The Korean students speak very little English so I have not gotten to know them well however, my Thai friend "Song ba" has been a great help to me.

Thank you, for your support I should have a lot more posts coming up soon to catch you up with the past few weeks of whats been going on here in Asia!

Chi le ma: This will make you want to move to China

Chi le ma?

This will make you want to move to China!

This has become one of my favorite places immediately outside the gate to the school. And to the right is my favorite dish Niou Rou Chou la mian. That is "Cow Meat (beef) fried pulled noodles," and above you can see the guy pulling the blur of noodles!

Then of course their is a hot pot restaurant down the street. Here you just pick what every dishes you want at the counter from potatoes and beef to fish heads, crickets, grasshoppers, and grub worms. Then they calculate your bill by your plates at the end.



Here is another restaurant which has also another one of my favorites Chou r si, or fried r si. R si is another type of noodles that comes in large squares.

Xau Kau

This was a new experience for me. Here they grill your choice of which ever meat on a stick you'd like. The choices ranged from regular beef to chicken feet, chicken heart, beef intestines, dog, chicken liver and several others. I got a couple of just about everything as you can see on the right they all pretty much look exactly the same anyways.

Zhong qiu jie

On Tuesday the 25th of September China will be in celebration of their Autumn Festival. A huge part of this celebration is the consumption of Yue bing or moon cakes. There are two main different compartments of Moon Cakes, those from the North and those from the South. The ones from the North are filled with fruit flavors and have a more decorative outside. Coming in flavors like apple, hawthorn, pinneable and just about every kind of fruit. The Southern style, as depicted to the right, is different however and contains meats rather than fruit. These contain salt cured ham, chicken, and bean. Personally I much rather prefer the southern style moon cakes since the Northern ones are way too sweet.


Cooking At Home...
If I come back to the US really skinny it will not be because of the food here, it will be because I cooked too many of my own meals... It can be very difficult for a waiguoren when even shopping at WALMART to get items for food. The only thing which I have actually made is Chou fan but I often buy some new mystery item to place inside.
Thus far I have done tomato, goat cheese, chinese sausage, eggs, and one time some sardines because I thought it was dried beef...
I should maybe just quit while I am ahead...

Bao zi Breakfast

It has become a ritual of mine to go right outside the gate every mourning to get freshly cooked Baozi. I always get xin rou (pork) but they have other kinds as well such as mushroom. You can get liang ge or 2 for 1.2 RBM so it beats the dollar menu for breakfast at 16 US cents for breakfast!


Well it may seems weird to start with dinner and end with breakfast, but when I am eating breakfast your eating dinner and when i am eating dinner your eating breakfast...

Man zou!

Hong Ta Shan

Hong Ta Shan

Hong Ta Shan (red pagoda mountain) is located right behind the university

Hong Ta Tobacco factory, which I have referenced to in earlier posts, is the largest tobacco factory in all of China and produces one of the two most popular brands of cigarettes in China. Thus, this park is the result of this factory as is much of the development within the city.

The park, which is on a shan or moutnain reveals a breath taking view of the city.
It also reveals a nice view of the headquarters to the Hong Ta tobacco factory as shown below.

Yunnan is also known to have more minorities than any other providence in China. While visiting the park I was treated to a traditional song and dance by a group of Yi minorities.

At this point I still have not met any nationals so I was visiting the park on my own. I was also told that there were temples here at the park, or at least I thought that was what I was told. So I began looking for the temples, though I did not find them I found a lot other nice sites at the park which are represented in the pictures below.

After walking around the park I noticed what looked like they could possibly be temples up in the mountains as shown in the picture on the right. As you can see from my posts so far I am just about never sure of anything that is going on. However, I went anyways...


In order to get there I had had to cross the street, which passed a newly built water fall. At the other end of the street was a stair case as shown in the picture. So I went up hoping that I wasn't ascending these steps for no reason. Certainly in the end it was all worth it...

I did make it to the temples, however not after I took a long short cut...

I ended up taking a trail that went way out of the way causing me to get to the temples by the time they closed and thus that will have to be another post. However, the hike was well worth it as I nearly got eatten by giant roosters which I nearly had to kick off the path to get by. After about an hour hike up the mountain side I had an awesome view of the entire city with a rainbow bowed right down into it!



Until next time, zai jian!