An Average Day in Kunming

6:30 AM: My sister's alarm clock goes off. I used to take this as my cue to get up as well, but have sinse discovered that it is neither necessarily nor conducive toward maintaining happiness. While Mei Mei gets up and dresses for school, I roll over and go back to sleep. She is gone by 7:00 AM, and I don't see her again until 7:00 PM when she gets home from school. I usually wake up between 7:30 and 8:00, depending how lazy I feel. If I'm not up by 8:00, the mother comes into my room anyway and begins bustling around, making Mei Mei's bed, hanging clothing to dry out her window, putting away freshly folded clothing. She used to start doing this at 7:00 AM until I cracked and had my leaders call and request that I get to sleep a little bit later. She is always confused why I can't sleep past the time that she enters my room and usually tells me "Zai Shui Jiao!" (go back to sleep). She then proceeds to lean over my cot, which is pushed up against the clothing cubbords, and put away clothes. She also leaves the door open allowing the shouting from the living room to enter, unwelcomed, into my room.

And so I get up. I have to get dressed and make my bed and clean my room before I go into the living room, otherwise the mother will come in and do it for me. And her version of cleaning my room consists of shoving whatever it left on the floor or the bed under the bed. (Can you tell that I clash slightly with my homestay mom? She drives me even more nuts than my own mother does). As soon as go into the living room, my grandfather tells me to go wash my face and hands. Even if breakfast is ready, I absolutely cannot eat until I clean myself. Breakfast usually consists of warm, slighlty sweetened milk in a bowl and some sort of pastry. One morning the pastry was a cold hotdog covered in mayonaise from Walmart. While I ate it, my grandfather sat and watched me and asked me if it was like what I usually ate in America. I didn't know how to tackle the hotdog, so I talked about the milk instead. I told him that in america, I drink cow's milk, but that it is usually cold and has no sugar. The next morning he produced cold milk for me. A sweet gesture, but my non-fat, clover milk preferring tastebuds were none too happy. After breakfast, I usually sit and try to communicate with my grandfather. At 8:30, I take off. Bus 90 takes me to the Baishun area where my gym is and I lift weights in the morning. The gym doesn't open until 9:00 AM, an annoying fact that is true of most businesses in China.

From 9:00-10:00, I work out and then dress and take Bus 84 (or sometimes a taxi if I am running late) over to the Language School. From 10:30-12:30, I have Chinese class. We are not required to go to class, and our new teacher is pretty miserable, so lately only Trevor, Ben, and I have been coming to class. Afterwards, we usually have some sort of a group lunch and Chay takes us to a new restaurant.

The afternoons vary greatly depending on the day of the week. On Tuesdays and Fridays, we have history/business in China classes. On some other days we have guest lecturers or leader lessons. We have studying Chinese history, business and economics, Chinese medicine, Chinese Tea, and Nuclear Power in China. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, I have a cooking lesson.

The cooking lesson.
Christina and I (and sometimes Trevor) meet at the program house at 2:00 and usually first go to Salvadors for a scoop of Green Tea icecream before starting. We then devise a menu and go either to the outdoor market behind the program house or to Carrefore's to buy our ingrediants. Then we head back to the program house to cook our meal. The kitchen we cook in is TINY, so we usually do a lot of the preparation outside the kitchen. Christina invites over friends and we feed whoever happens to be in the program house at the time. Chinese cooking is very fast, a dish only takes a few minutes to make. But you can only make one dish at a time because pretty much everything is fried in oil over the stove, which explains why food never comes out at the same time in Chinese restaurants.