Things that have happened recently

I have had lots of visitors lately. Also, many people have left Kunming. I am living in this crazy city where many people are just sort of passing through, here for a month or two or six and then off on the next adventure. Of course, there are also many people who have been here for years. There is a whole contingent of somewhat strange older white men who came to Kunming 30 years ago and just never left. They sit around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee all day until evening time when they exchange their coffee cup for a cold beer.
However, these guys are not the majority. The majority of people in Kunming are passing through...for a week or a semester or a couple of years. It is an interesting mindset among foreigners. You find a group of people you like and then they disappear for a month to go traveling through Vietnam or Laos or to go back to their native land. And then you meet more cool new interesting well-traveled people and make friends with them for a while. And yet, somehow it seems that all the foreigners in Kunming know each other.
Exactly two days after my brother left China my friend from Macalester who is currently working in Beijing came to visit for a couple days. During this time we visited a bunch of the Buddhist Temples around Kunming that I had yet to get to. I also educated him on the wonders of the Kunming dining experience, we attended a photography club meeting at the botanical gardens with a bunch of Chinese college student who met on a website (something that is much more common and less sketchy here than in the states), and spent some time discussing our experiences thus far in China.
For example, my friend put out an add for a language exchange partner in Beijing where he lives. He got a response from a Chinese woman who expected him to be a big strong handsome rich successful white guy and potential husband. When they met to practice speaking together she seemed rather disappointed that he was so young (she was 27) and that he was therefore not a potential future spouse. She patted him on the head and bought him the Chinese equivalent of a lollipop or a cookie.
After eating his way through Kunming, my friend returned to Beijing. The next day passover started, and I have to admit that I skipped out on a huge seder of 50 or so people that was being organized by the Israeli population of Kunming in order to go to the Hot Springs with my fellow Dragons colleagues. All of the semester program instructors have been working really hard and were leaving the next day to go traveling for a month and somehow I got to tag along on this crazy China Spa experience.
For 170 kuai ($25...which is A LOT of money in China) we got to wear huge comfy terri-cloth bathrobes, lie around in pools of hot water that had been infused with various Chinese medicinal or beneficial herbs, relax in a sauna, play around in a huge swimming pool filled with various water-using massage devices and ball-pit balls (for throwing at each other), get a 1.5 hour Chinese Massage, eat noodles, and have our toenails clipped for us while eating a jello-like substance that tasted a bit like charcoal. My favorite part though was the matching shorts and t-shirt pajama set that we all got to wear (I very nearly stole mine because they were that awesome) and the identification bracelets that made us all feel a little bit like we were in some sort of mental hospital. So, you see, I have an excuse for missing the passover seder.
This past Thursday the Dragons semester group took off for their month of travel, on Saturday my friends who are studying with the S.I.T. program in Kunming hit the road for the next six weeks, and while I will miss these people for a bit, lets just say that I have not been sitting at home moping about it.
I spent my weekend reading and relaxing, going out for meals and chatting with friends. I ate my first da-pan-ji (literally big plate chicken), a food that comes from Xinjiang which is in the northwest part of China that has a heavy Muslim influence and incredibly delicious food. This dish is literally an entire chicken (it serves four) cooked up with potatoes and some green peppers in a rich tangy sauce. When I say an entire chicken, I mean the ENTIRE chicken. Evan would not have liked this very much because when he was here I 'accidentally' ordered him chicken feet instead of chicken wings and he nearly cried and asked if we could remove them from our table. I said no, and started to attack him with them. He liked this a lot.
I also have a Chinese friend who offered to teach me how to cook. She is a great cook, and an incredibly nice and generous person. The problem is that she is too nice and doesn't actually let me help so much, I chop a few vegetables here and there and carry the dishes from the kitchen to the table. However, the lessons so far have done little to actually make me feel more comfortable with cooking in China. I have, however, gotten to eat some amazingly delicious homemade food and so I am okay with it.
Today I spent nearly the entire day speaking Chinese. This really shouldn't be a big deal because last semester I spent every day all day speaking, but since I have come to Kunming I have been speaking too much English. I went to class in the morning (the old Japanese men entertained me by teasing each other about drinking too much alcohol)had lunch with a Chinese friend, then went to chat with a potential Chinese teacher for dragons summer programs, and then this evening went to visit a family that will host dragons students this summer in order to learn how to interview and screen families. I have that I-have-spoken-a-lot-of-Chinese-today feeling in my mouth where forming the sounds of the English language becomes a bit difficult. I should probably make it my goal to get this feeling more often.
Also today, a random friend who I worked with two summers ago showed up in Kunming. He contacted me because he is studying in Beijing and came down to my province for a visit. We had a nice meal where I got to introduce yet another person to the amazingness that is Yunnan food. It is pretty weird and at the same time not weird at all to have random people continuously appear in this city.

Note to the reader: I just went through and proofread and found about 10-15 problems with my grammar and ability to speak in the past tense. -has-have-had was a particularly large problem. I am sorry for any more problems that exist that might make reading this blog a little painful, or make you think that the author is not a native English speaker.