Dad and Mom in China!

As I type this Eric is Seoul, Korea for an AP World History conference. He left in the early hours of yesterday morning and will be gone until Monday. His departure removes all excuses for me putting off this blog update any longer.

February has been a great month for us.

Feb. 1^st my parents arrived and were our first official visitors! We were so excited they made the journey. They spend 11 days with us and we did our best to present them with an idea of what our everyday life looks like, all the while showing them all that Kunming has to offer.

 The day they arrived was our last day of school before Chun Jie (Spring Festival with the climax being Chinese New Year.) KIA has a tradition of holding a giant high school pep rally the last day before break. KIA pep rallies are nothing like the pep rallies your high school held. They are not associated with sports teams or big tournaments; they are simply a showcase for fun games and silly class skits. Eric and I are class advisors to the 9^th graders and 10^th graders, respectively, and we both participated in the pep rally skits. Eric stole the show (I am not just saying this because I am his wife) with his rendition of a K-pop (Korean pop music) dance. It was the single funniest performance all afternoon! Thankfully, my parents arrived just in time to see his skit.

We spent the rest of Friday catching up, hearing about their funny travel stories, and allowing them time to settle in and unpack. We took them to dinner at a local squatty restaurant. Squatty is an affectionate name given to the traditional, open-front, short tabled Chinese restaurants that are found on almost every corner. You sit on straw cushions and depending on your age and the condition of your knees, they are not the most comfortable. We wanted to introduce them to real Chinese food and I think they both really liked it, although my Dad did not love the chopsticks.

Saturday we picked up a scooter that a fellow KIA teacher lent us for the week. This was no ordinary scooter, but what we term an “Old Person Scooter” because it is a three wheeler with a bench seat behind the driver. This was the super hip way my Dad got around while in China! Eric drove him and Mom and I biked behind. We showed them around the neighborhood and took them to Wal-Mart so they could experience the Chinese take on an American store. I think it was the abundance of chicken feet available that surprised them the most.

Sunday we took them to Fellowship and then out to lunch with a big group of our friends afterwards, before making our way slowly back home and taking it easy that afternoon. That night we all went out with a big group of people for Hot Pot. Hot Pot is a food eaten exclusively in the winter. Everyone sits around a table with a large, boiling pot of broth in the middle and you dump in vegetables and meats and they cook in the pot before you fish them out with chopsticks. It is fondue Chinese-style.

We don’t have Super Bowl Sunday here, but we did enjoy Super Bowl Monday! I was so happy to be able to take my parents to a Super Bowl party at our friends, the Rodgers’, house. They were able to TiVo the game and had a big party so we all could enjoy it! We had a relaxing afternoon after the game.

We started our touristy stuff on Tuesday by taking them downtown to the Bird and Flower Market, a huge market selling everything from, you guessed it, birds to flowers. There are stalls selling tea, ethnic minority crafts, window cleaning supplies, fish, pipes, clothing, carvings, gardening tools, and on and on. We roamed around for a while sampling the street food. Our favorite was the friend rice dough with bananas and sweetened condensed milk. So good. We made our way then by bus to an area of town near the university that is locally known as “Foreigner Street” because of all of the expats in the area. The area was originally the only place that foreigners could live after China was opened. There are shops and restaurants all around that cater to westerners and it is kind of nice to know that when I am having a hard China day, I can go somewhere where English is widely spoken/understood.

Dad and Mom downtown

Wednesday gave Eric and me the opportunity to do something we hadn’t yet done: visit the Stone Forest. If you Google sites to see around Kunming, or even Yunnan, Stone Forest would be near the top. The area of Yunnan in which we live is a part of the China karst- a geological landscape formed by the dissolution of limestone. Stone Forest is a forest of huge slabs of limestone through which you wander on a narrow, winding path. It is a pretty amazing sight! That afternoon we visited the Jiuxiang Scenic Area caves. They too are made of limestone and are pretty spectacular to walk through. There were huge stalactites and stalagmites and terraced pools made of limestone. Unfortunately, my camera ran out of batteries about 5 minutes into the cave so I have photos of none of this! The worst part of the day was the rickety ski lift we took from the cave exit back up to the parking lot. It was terrifying.

At Stone Forest

Thursday we biked/scooted to Xi Shan (Western Mountains) and rode a gondola up to the side of the mountain before getting on another ski lift and riding to the very edge of the mountain. Our goal was to reach the Dragon Gate, a temple carved into the face of the mountain over a period of 75 years. The ski lift was not so terrifying and the view of Kunming was spectacular. We hiked from the ski lift endpoint area down a stepped path to the cave entrance of the Dragon Gate. After the short cave we came out on the side of the mountain next to an open temple carved into the rock. It was beautiful. We hiked all along the path through the different temples and ended back up near where the ski lifts started. We rode back down on the gondola and took the rest of the day off!

Eric loves picture time!

For a more relaxing outing, on Friday we headed to Anning with a big group of friends and spent the day in the hot springs at Anning Spa. The spa is in the forest and has a couple dozen stone lined hot pools. They are set to varying temps and some have special scents- coconut milk, mint, lemon, rose petal, sugar cane (which really looks like Coke), and strawberry. If relaxing scents are not your cup of tea there is a pool of fish that you can dip your feet (or whole body) into and they will eat your dead skin. Since that pretty much sums up my idea of torture, I steer clear of this pool.

Chinese New Year’s Eve was Saturday and we could feel the excitement in the air. We took a bike ride (or scooter ride in Eric and Dad’s case) and ended up back downtown. There were families out together and people were buying gifts for friends and relatives to give out that night. We had time to kill and were somewhat hungry so we ended up at McDonalds and ordered some of the desserts unique to China (or at least Asia). We got the tiramisu McFlurry, pineapple pie, taro pie, and red bean pie (as noted in an earlier blog, red bean is a very popular flavor here.) With the exception of the red bean pie, which wasn’t as disgusting as I had anticipated, they were all pretty good. Later we saw a fruit vendor and decided to try durian. If you are not familiar with this popular South East Asia fruit, it is known for its rancid smell (it is banned in the Singapore subway system), its custard-like consistency, and its oniony taste. It tasted just as horrible as you are imagining it to taste and worst of all, the taste stayed with you!

This is what they thought of durian. No poker faces here. 

That evening we headed to Curt and Solveig’s house for a New Year’s Eve party! There was a big crowd there and we ate and played games and talked until the big event at midnight. Not that we needed to wait until midnight for fireworks- we heard them periodically all afternoon and then as soon as it got dark, there were fireworks on and off every few minutes. But midnight was the real show. We all climbed up to the roof of the building and watched as the sky around us lit us and the noise! Wow, the big, booming filled the air and shook the ground. We could see all of the car alarms going off below in the parking lot. The night lived up to the hype and was pretty fantastic.

Because we didn't get to bed until about 3am, Sunday was a slower day. We had brunch with our friend's Michelle and Lacey and spent the morning sitting on Michelle's sunny desk drinking coffee, eating, and laughing. Our afternoon was spent at a local park. We were there with what seemed to be all of Kunming. 

Monday brought Dad and Mom’s departure. We had a great time with them and I think they really enjoyed it. We are seasoned hosts now, so visitors welcome!