Nihao!

Hey all– hope everything is going well! Shangri La is gorgeous & it rains a lot. We have visited a monastery and have seen the monks and heard them chant. It sent shivers down my spine!

On Sunday we visited Snow Mountain which is 12 thousand odd feet high. It was definitely the highest up I've ever been. We had to take a scary lift up there. Fortunately for my fear of heights Cory kept us in stitches the whole time. He’s like a George Carlin. I got a bit altitude sick at the top & my camera battery died, but Ally got some great shots.

Yesterday we got down to business. Josh & I spent the afternoon mapping out the Old City while the others canvassed hospitals and observed passers-by. Today we have a translator and hope to talk to some shopkeepers.

Miss you guys. Hope all is well. I’m feeling amazing.

Photos

Check this out! Pictures! Shangri La has wireless. It’s a cool 54 degrees Farenheit here- feels amazing. Our accomodations are amazing too- like little ski chalets. This should be fun.

More Updates

Back from dinner. Where did I leave off?

We learned a lot from our studies of the Dong people. Apparently, most people enjoy living in the village, and while they may have to go out to look for work, many come back. It is a very family-centric atmosphere. They are all very close. The little girls are all in the choir, and they sang fantastically. We never sang that good in church choir. We also got a private concert from three women who had gone out to a singing competition in another province. It was breathtaking. They hit notes that probably wouldn’t be recorded on the video camera. I did video the little girls singing. I want to post photos and video, but this computer refuses to recognize my card. Oh well.

The Dong sing about everything. We heard mostly greeting songs and drinking songs, but we also heard a courtship song. Our translator Nerissa sang a courtship song to our guide Weixian, and he responded favorably! How cute! They are a good match, and she is currently spending some time with his family.

Most of the Dong who live in the village are farmers. They also raise livestock, and we often saw our lunch and dinner being butchered in the kitchen. What an experience. Ally and I once came upon a woman walking her pig one morning. She’d poke him with a stick and he’d automatically go wherever she wanted. The crops of the villagers are raised in terraced fields on the mountainsides. It is very picturesque! Monday morning, the head teacher of the school took us out to his pear orchard. Those were some of the best pears I’ve ever tasted. We stood there, peeling pears and looking over the village, and I must say it was the best Monday morning I’ve ever had in my whole life.

The restrooms were quite an experience. After using the household restroom once, we all deferred to using the school restroom…. talk about hole in the ground! I will never complain about a portapotty again. I would have given my eyeteeth for one. Despite that, life was pretty idyllic. We’d wander about with one or more of our translators, learning a little Dong and talking to families and playing with the children. I taught our host family’s three year old daughter to use my camera, and she took better photos than I did! The kids are all so cute! The same little girl started crying and running after us when we left. Needless to say, we had become good friends with the childpack. Amanda taught them all their ABC’s, and Monday night she sat in a throng of children at the drum tower, all of them singing ABC’s for more than an hour. The drum tower is the central meeting place for the Dong. They all meet there to, as some older men said, “make important decisions” (we never quite found out what they were), play cards, or socialize.

The only other complaints were the tiny chairs and the lack of sleep. We got used to the sleep problem eventually, as most of our lack was accredited to fear of rats, creepy crawlies, and the chicken who roosted behind our wall and talked to herself all night. The tiny chairs, however, were painful beyond words. They are stools that sit no further than a foot off the ground, and the Dong use them for everything. My rear end would start complaining whenever I looked at one, and at the end of the trip we were all sitting on the floor to eat. The tables are short, as well. I went in for a traditional Chinese massage here in Kunming, and the guy pressed on my lower back and my whole spine sounded like a row of gunshots. I feel much better now.

At the same time that we were learning Dong, we were teaching our translators more English. Weixian knows a lot of English, more than he lets on, but he is a perfectionist (he is a teacher of Dong in another school) and refuses to speak English unless it is grammatically perfect. We taught him a lot of funny words, and Nerissa as well. He took to saying “Wonderful” while holding up all five curled fingers. This is in response to Nerissa, who often holds up the “V for victory” two fingers. He took it to mean extremely good if all five fingers are used. Cute, right? Nerissa has an infectious laugh, and she and Amanda became fast friends. Whenever we needed to find them in the village, we would listen for their twin giggles echoing across the village. They woke up a villager or two on their nightly trips to the bathroom. She and Weixian taught us a lot of Dong words and phrases.

Note that the last letter in each word is a tone letter, and is not pronounced. The Dong have nine tones in their language, c, x, s, l, p, t, v, k, and h, which affect how you would say the word.

hello: nyac lail
delicious: lail jil
if it is delicous, eat more of it: lail jil, jil gunge nyil
to drink (cheers): umx kuaot
to get drunk (Nerissa): deil kuaot
cucumber: gueel
girl: lagx miegs / lagx beix
boy: lagx banl / lagx hank
you’re welcome: meec yuv jens
I’m full: yaoc jeengx yangx
yes: jangs
no: mec / bix (or not)
goodbye: seik bail / bail loh
food: jil
potato: yangcyil
tomato: haix queec
I/me/my: yaoc
don’t bother me: bix naox yaoc
what’s your name?: Nyac guanl mangc
my name is: yaoc guanl ____.
rice: oux
how/why: weex noux

Our other translators were Wang and Sun. Wang is a geography teacher in another village. He mostly stayed in the background. Sun is a very animated 17-year-old from Rong Jiang area. He was kicked out of his parents’ house when his grandfather moved in with them, and now rents a room. He attends university for music, and has a gorgeous voice. We kept saying we wanted to import him into the US and get him a record deal. Josh has his demo CD. I started calling him Little Brother because he reminds me a lot of Evan. Our nicknames for Nerissa were Giggles and Sunshine, the latter because when we taught her about moonshine, she exclaims, “Like the opposite of sunshine!” Weixian we called Smile, because he is very quiet, but did a lot of smiling (and also because he had one hell of a time pronouncing the word.) Nerissa nicknamed me Silent, probably because I didn’t laugh like a hyena all the time, while she and Amanda were constantly in giggle fits.

Not many of the Dong have been out of the village. The elderly mostly said they had never been, and if they needed anything, would send someone else in the family. With the new road, more and more younger people are venturing out. There are three small shops in the village that sell the basics. Most of the children would buy snacks. Some of the women had been out for singing competitions, including our host’s daughters. The host that the girls stayed with was the old headmaster. One day for lunch two Communist police officers came and ate. It was kind of tense.

July 29 we left the village in the early afternoon. It was pretty tearful. The vans came up to get us. By then we were all missing showers very much, and upon getting to Rong Jiang, I took a very long shower until the hot water ran out. Some of us, myself included, had contracted colds while in the village, probably from lack of sanitation. My ears were draining and I had a chest full of gunk, so that shower felt awesome. We slept for the rest of the day and into the next morning, where we said a tearful goodbye to Nerissa and Weixian and boarded the bus for another hellish eight hours. Wang had slipped out sometime the night before, and we hadn’t realized he’d gone.

This bus ride, I got smart, or dumb, and took a couple of Ambien to make it go faster. I did nap some, but apparently I spent most of the trip either staring intently at Josh and Ally or babbling at Sun about nothing in particular. Scott, who I was sitting by, pretty much tuned me out. He (Dr. Henson) is my new hero. He’s so laid back and worldly, and knows how to have fun while at the same time being serious. He exclaimed during our party at one point, “It is a good professor’s duty to get his students drunk!” and subsequently took a shot of rice wine with me. At the same time, he is very together and knowledgeable, and knows how to get in and out of a variety of situations. Case in point: The umbrella disaster.

When we arrived in Guiyang again, we headed out to Chinese Wal Mart for cough medicine. This Wal Mart was reminiscent of the Louvre (I thought of Evan again) with big glass pyramids over it. We rented umbrellas because it rained some. After dinner, the umbrella I was holding broke at the handle. The ladies at the front hotel desk threw an absolute wobbly over it. Scott was intent on getting our deposit back, and told those ladies exactly how it was (with Sun’s help). It was hilarious. We were all (the ladies included) laughing hysterically by the end of it.

We said another tearful goodbye to Sun, and headed to bed. This morning we got up and caught our flight to Kunming. Kunming is amazing. It is beautiful, clean, quiet, and everything that Shanghai wasn’t. We had lunch at a little pub and then Amanda and I hit the spa. We both got fantastic Chinese acupressure massages, and then she got reflexology done while I had a pedicure. I feel amazing, and it was about ten US dollars in total. Can’t beat that, truly.

Well, some more people want the computers, so I’d better get off of here. I believe I caught up to where we are currently. Tomorrow we board a flight to Diqing and get to Shangri La. I’m excited! So, until the next time I find an internet connection,

Updates from Kunming

Whew, it’s been a while without internet. When I left off, we were getting ready to board a flight to Guiyang.

July 25-26
The flight was the bumpiest one I’d ever been on! I admit I was kind of praying for my life, haha. One of our translators, Sun, Scott’s friend Prolo, and our guide Weixian met us at the Guiyang airport and took us to the Guiyang Sport Hotel, which was a bit seedy but okay. Prolo got us checked in and then we went to Chinese Wal Mart, which was quite an experience. It was two stories, with food on top and everything else below. I got myself a small bag to carry things around in, but had a problem when paying. Apparently, Visa is not everywhere you want to be. Ohwell. I paid with cash.

We then had a long and delicious dinner at a Chinese-style restaurant where they bring out a bunch of dishes and we pick what we want off of them. We had a long meeting with the translators, Prolo, and Scott’s other friend Jacob, who works closely with the Dong people. Then it was time for a short meeting and bed.

The next morning, Ally, Josh, Cory, and I went out to get photos around Guiyang. Ally about got us arrested (not) when she took a photo of a person who did not want his photo taken. We then trooped out to the bus, where the bus driver promptly called me fat and threw a fit over our bags. He was a bit of a pompous twit. That and an eight hour bus ride meant that I was ready to beat the hell out of him by the end of it. The bus ride featured a great eight hour DVD of Chinese variety shows. We kept the iPods turned up high, especially since the stupid driver had an obsession with blowing his horn at five second intervals. It was a bumpy and rough ride, and while none of the Americans threw up, many Chinese did.

Upon arriving in Rong Jiang, we met our other two translators, Nerissa and Wang. We stayed the night in the Rong Jiang Hotel and ate dinner. We had singing at dinner, and you all will be very proud to know that I sang. So ha. We then returned to the hotel for a cold shower and sleep.

July 27
After a bumpy 4-wheeling trip up a mountain on which our second driver had multiple difficulties with  mud puddles, we arrived in the village. I can’t even hope to begin to describe the village correctly. It was a dirt road with wooden structures. Chickens and dogs run around everywhere and it smells faintly of cow and pig. The people wear colorful clothing and the children run in adorable packs. On the way up we learned a little Dong from Sun, and could say “Nyac lail” which means hello, and “Lail jil” which means delicious, in keeping with the food. After a lunch with our host families, which included tables and chairs VERY low to the ground, we dropped our stuff off and began interviewing families. It is very poor in the village, but EVERYONE has a television. The government subsidized satellite dishes, but most people watch Dong songs and operas. That night, we all had a drinking party in which we learned the phrase “Umx kuaot” which means Cheers. We used that phrase a lot in drinking the traditional Dong rice wine, which we taught them the word “moonshine” for. Amanda and I got very happy and made good drinking friends. Apparently another tradition is to sing and present the wine to a friend, and I sang “Viva Colonia” to get Sun to drink. He is Evan’s age and is very funny. Then a whole horde of little girls came and gave us an amazing concert. We taught them the Itsy Bitsy Spider.

The next day, with a miraculous absence of hangover and sleep (the roosters crow all night) we spent most of the day interviewing people. When I get more time (I only have 30 minutes and they want to go to lunch) I will write more about the village interviews. Probably tonight (it is shortly before 2pm here, and I know is 2am at home).

We are now (July 31) in Kunming on our way to Shangri La. This hotel has computer access, so I will get on later tonight. I miss you all and hope all are well.