I arrived in Kunming Saturday at noon, February 22, two days before classes started at YunDa (short for Yunnan Daxue - Yunnan University). I took a taxi from the airport to the hotel-like foreign students housing that I had previously stayed in during my first two visits to Kunming. From the reception desk I called Zhang to help me figure out where I would stay and so that she could show me where classes would be on Monday morning. I knew Zhang already as she had previously tutored my friend in Kunming. I had also met her during my two previous visits to China. She came right over but during the ten minutes before she arrived I could not resist the snack food on the street. I had a fried-banana pancake filled with sugar, butter and condensed milk. Also while waiting I saw in an elevator a girl that would soon become my prime target for teasing, Edith, from Spain.

Zhang and I looked at the two dormitories. There was newer housing (the hotel-like place I referred to above) and older housing. I needed time decide which one to take, since the newer one was nicer but had less of a social scene and less character. We went to her apartment and she cooked for me. I decided on the older housing even though the toilets did not flush well (a bucket is required to supply enough force). The older housing had only one room available in the varous buildings, which I took. My room is a one-minute walk to class. I just go down one flight of steps, across the walkway fifteen steps, then up two flights of steps and down the hallway twenty steps! I pay $6 / night, which is expensive for China.

My dorm room is actually two rooms and can be a small double. One is the bedroom, with two beds. The other room has one desk, two old soft chairs and a desk chair as well as a cabinet for shelves and clothes. I have my own private bath and shower and have hot water in the mornings and evenings after 7. I am on the second floor and in a good social location as anyone going to the third and fourth floors must pass my room. When I first arrived I kept my door open so I could meet people. There is an interesting Thai girl on the fourth floor who usually stops by and talks to me in Chinese and leaves by saying she does not want to trouble me, that I am busy and must return to whatever it is I am doing. But the truth is her Chinese is way better than mine and I do not understand what she says. She gets bored of me asking her to repeat herself and saying I do not understand.

Next door to me is an American and a Japanese person. The majority of the students is South Korean. There is a medium number of Americans and Japanese. I also know people from Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Indonesia and Thailand. There are many reasons people are here studying Chinese. Some are taking time off and having fun, like me, some are teaching English, and some want to learn to speak for professional reasons.

I have classes each weekday from 8-10 and classes Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 10-12. I also go to Kong Fu twice each week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For the rest of the free time I have before dinner, about 10 hours a week, I get tutored. So far I have not gotten bored of studying Chinese and do not expect to.

The Kong Fu I do here is all slow movements but afterward my heart is beating and I feel the workout in my muscles. In some ways it is like Yoga but there is less stretching and more movement.

I want to speak Chinese soon, but I spend a lot of time talking to people in English and making friends so that will slow the process. On the other hand, I am having a great time. It is as if I am on a vacation, but have the constant mental challenge that I need in learning Chinese.

If it is not clear from above, I am very busy. I spend most of the day studying Chinese in class or with a tutor. During the breaks I have Kong Fu, lunch, or do e-mail. At night I often eat out with a friend and when I get home have little time left for anything, including studying. And now that I bought a TV and DVD player it may get worse.

On one of my first days here I met a Chinese girl with the English name of Marsha. I laughed when I heard it since it made me think of the Brady Bunch. Her English is not great. We have become friends and I speak Chinese while she speaks English to me. We each keep track of the words we learn on a sheet of paper but I do not have much time to study those sheets. We hang out a couple of times each week and I have learned a lot from her, not just about the Chinese language but about the Chinese culture as well. She is also teaching me how to cook. Her apartment does not have a kitchen but the small stove she uses outside with a wok is enough.

She always gets upset when I get annoyed at random things, but it is so difficult not to sometimes here. That is not just because of the cultural differences but because of the communications gap. For example, when at a Kodak film development store, I tried to explain that I wanted panoramic prints and it seemed like they had never heard of it (and maybe they hadn't).

Twice I ate out with Marsha and we had problems that caused me to get upset. Marsha did not like that I would express my concerns three times (though she said twice is OK) but it often seems to take that to resolve the problems. She also gets unhappy with me when I do not eat all of the rice, since people work so hard in the field to grow it.

Marsha is 24 and goes to art school. She said that she will get married when she finishes school later this year. I asked her to whom and she does not know, though it will not be an arranged marriage. I do not yet understand dating and love-life in China.

Marsha invited me to a bike ride my first Saturday morning in Kunming and I joined her. We met with a group at a bike shop and rented good bikes. Then we headed to mountains that are near the city. The ride was tough and even the best riders often had to walk their bikes. In the middle of the ride we stopped for some lunch and to relax for a couple of hours.

During my second week here I became sick from Chinese food. On one night that I was not feeling great to begin with, I spoke with Marsha for a few hours. When I returned home I chatted with two begginner Chinese students, two Korean neighbors of mine, in Chinese for an hour. That's a lot of Chinese for one day. At night I had a nightmare that I was saying the same thing over and over again in Chinese and I woke up disturbed. I am not kidding when I say I would have gone crazy had I not put on English music (Toad the Wet Sprocket). The next morning I was sick and did not get better for a couple of days. My stomach felt worse than it did the day before and I did not feel like eating. I think it was from some food I ate. The night before, the same night I had the nightmare, I already was not feeling well, and stocked up on western food. I bought Chips Ahoy, Kellogs cereal, Muesli, Dannon yogurts, and some expensive apples. Since this incident, I am much more careful about washing my hands and making sure I eat clean food though I cannot stay away from street food.

One of my classmates told me about a trip to to a minority village a couple hours from Kunming. A group of both foreign and local volunteers help the locals of a small village build houses. I decided to go, but when I left my dorm at 7:15 Saturday morning, I saw that I was locked into my dorm complex and had to climb a 14-foot high wired fence. My brother wanted me to exaggerate that. It is his style of story telling and writing. I do not exaggerate and bend the truth. It was really a 7-foot fence, but it did have spikes and if I slipped I would not be able to have kids.

On the Sunday of the next weekend, my third full weekend in Kunming, I went with Marsha to the Western Hills. It is a nice place to hike. We stayed there for hours. It is an hour outside Kunming and we stood on the bus for over an hour on the ride there. We got on the bus at the first stop but could not get seats. There is a mad rush to the bus door and a lot of pushing. If you mind pushing old ladies and blind people you will have problems. That is part of the fun here.

That is a summary of my first few weeks here.

Some random interesting notes.

It is very hard to say words correctly because some people will tell me I am pronouncing it wrong while some will say I say fine, even when I make it clear I want the criticism.

It seems like there is a labor surplus here and many people have tedious, strenuous, unnecessary or boring jobs.

Popcorn is sold on the street and is coated with sugar instead of salt. My brother says it is like this in much of the world, including Chile.

There is a dish called "stinky tofu," though I do not think it is nearly as bad as the durian fruit that is popular in some parts of Asia.

I can buy half a pineapple on a stick for ten cents and these are sold all over the place. Another neat ten-cent food (ten cents is one kuai) is a fried banana. For twenty cents I get 10 awesome dumplings. For three cents I get a green-bean ice-cream pop. I love the ice cream here while many foreigners very much miss the richer ice cream we have back home. In addition to liking ice cream, I also like the bean-flavored ice-cream (red and grean bean), which many foreigners dislike enough to talk about it and make a face.

I met a girl here I really like named Coral-Ann. The first time I saw her, on the street and before class started, I thought she was snotty but we have become friends and agree on so much. Coral-Ann has a boyfriend, Aaron, who she is clearly in love with and I think it is an example of a great relationship where a couple is deeply in love (though I have not met him as he is now elsewhere in China). I want to ask her to write about it for me. We went to the CD/DVD store and I asked her to pick out some CDs for me to buy. They are only $1 so it is a great chance to try music. I bought six that were recommended by her but need to give all of them multiple listens before deciding which ones I like. She will also lend me some australian music soon. The CDs I bought are Incubus (Morning View), Gomez (Liquid Skin), Pulp Hits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Nocturama), The Verve (A Northern Soul), 100th Windows (Massive Attack). We have watched to DVDs together and so far it looks like we have similar tastes in movies. There are a couple of minor things that we see differently. They stand out only because sometimes I think we think exactly the same way. One is our different reactions to our condescending Kong Fu teacher. He always asks us in Chinese if we understand what he is saying and when we give him blank looks he gets annoyed. She finds his condescending attitude annoying while I find it funny. I find condescention funny in general.

I also have a French friend, Frederic. His Chinese teacher went off about how great the Chinese culture is and of the four major ancient cultures it is the only one that remains. . Frederic wanted to point out the culture in China that was lost because of Communism as well as point out that India's culture is strong, but did not. I am in a caligraphy class with Frederic and our teacher went off about the greatness of Mao as if we would be so interested. Frederic was also annoyed while I find the comments humerous. Frederic shared his opinions on the Iraq situation and I did not disagree. He does not want a war but also does not now the solution to that problem and realizes it is a problem.

When Edith, the Spanish girl I mentioned earlier, first saw me in her dorm's lobby while I called Zhang a few minutes after arriving in Kunming, she heard me speak Chinese and thought I spoke a lot. She studied Chinese for a year and at that point I had studied for one month. It turns out she knows a lot more than I do and is in a class ahead of me, but it is funny that she thought I spoke a lot. Later I found out she really just heard me say one really simple sentence.

When a group of us went out one night I accidentally made eye-contact with a strange looking girl and the strange looking girl she kept looking over. I mentioned the problem to Edith as we sat at a table with stools a foot off the ground. She explained that the problem is that when I look at girls I give them a certain look with my eyes. It is funny what people will think when they like you. At dinner one night, Edith said she likes me. Then she clarified "no in a different way!" I thought it was a joke and laughed. To me, when she initially said she liked me I assumed it was as a friend so when she said in a different way, I thought ha ha. But she said the clarification she made was to say that she liked me as a friend and that the initial like could be taken wrong. We are always joking around. I asked her how she got the name Edith, and she said she is the only person in Spain with the name. We also discussed the shirt I was wearing out. She thought it showed too much of my chest. In NYC I think it would look funny but I thought Europeans would not think anything of it. She agreed. Coral-Ann said that in Australia it also looks weird.

Another American here, who first introduced himself to the class as Big Bear, calls me banana boy because one day I talked about getting fried Bananas for about an hour, during lunch. I wanted to skip lunch and get the banana's but everyone else wanted to eat.

I had my first Mahjang lesson and liked it, so I will go again. I heard that I will think I know how to play and then be told about some other crazy rules. Mahjang is a very popular game in China and often people are playing on the street. I have no idea how to spell it and it is not in the dictionary.

It is funny how people here are so good at squating (like a baseball catcher). I think they could do so for hours and not get tired. It seems to be a comfortable sitting position for the Chinese.

Kunming is a large city and has four million people. It is referred to as "Spring City" because of the beatiful weather year-round. It is heavily populated but the streets are not crowded. It has hills a few miles from the city so it is easy to get away and have a nice quite day.

Chinese people have a difficult time pronouncing the letter "l." It is difficult for them to differentiate it from the letter "r," so they often say usually like "usuary". I was trying to help one of Marsha's friends with the pronunciation since her "l" sounded exactly like an "r" and then realized how difficult it is to explain the difference in the mouth and tongue positions when pronouncing these. Now I think I figured it out. If you say "rrrr" and then move the tongue forward while maintaining contact with the roof of the mouth, you will get "lll."