Stranger No More

Wow. So Mark and I have been traveling for two weeks and despite some net bar stops this is my first chance to give an substantive update. Well, sort of substantive.

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Mark arrived on Monday evening into Beijing and despite his hitting the Sichuan Airlines desk at 9:02PM they had already closed and just couldn’t possibly get him on to the 9:30PM connecting flight to Chengdu where I was waiting to meet him. Things were off to a bit of a rough start but he was taking it pretty well.

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With no great plan for my several week Spring Festival Holiday I was excited when Mark asked if I wanted to go to Shanghai to hang out with Cameron with him. My friend Roberto who used to live in Chengdu lives there now so the prospect of seeing Roberto again, (Very Cool Dude), added to the appeal of a visiting China’s largest city.

As the holiday approached I heard from Mark that he was having cash flow problems and wouldn’t be able go. Since tickets hadn’t been purchased I wasn’t too worried but I was now without plans. After a little thought I decided to head East anyway and contacted Roberto to see what he was up to.
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As I resolve to catch you up on my activities of the last month let me start by saying what a pleasure it has been to meet and travel with French people.

While traveling in Yunnan I met and took in the sites of Lijiang with Jean-Jacques. A spry fifty-something year old, he has been to over 100 countries and was as fascinating as he was kind.

More recently, while on holiday in Tibet, I met Dom and Karin when we were seated next to each other on the flight from Chengdu. From Normandy, France they live in and enjoy St. Barth in the Caribbean. Over the ten days we hung out and traveled around Tibet we quickly became friends. Easy-going but resolute with a strong passion for travel they are a delightful couple near my age and are planning to start a family soon. I wish them luck as they’ll be great parents.

When you travel, or in my case move, abroad you meet many different people from a variety of places. As with all human experiences personalities and compatabilities vary. It isn’t often that you consistently hit it off with all of the citizens of a nation but I’d just like to take a moment to acknowledge the French travelers I have recently encountered as great people.

Vive La France!

The first week of July I agreed to help Teresa with a couple of recruiting trips in order to try to get more students for summer school. The first weekend trip took us to the edge of Yunnan province to a small town whose name I don’t recall now. While this only gave me a glimpse of Yunnan, I will say it was an amazingly beautiful area and it left me longing to see more. We extended the two day trip to take a train out into the deep country for another day of recruiting. For me this involved just smiling and looking non-Chinese, both areas I excel in. The small appearing community we landed in was crammed into a steep valley with towering peaks. It was a very vertical town that took no more space than Santai but contains nearly four times the population at about 400K.

I awoke a bit before the group, (along with Teresa and I had come her assistant and two male friends), and went for a walk before rejoining them at the hotel. It was a great walk that let me check out only two streets and a bridge due to the layout and the time constraint. Like so many places in China I was met with friendly smiles, invites to converse and the sniping ‘hello’s’ as I walked by. The Hello Sniping is an interesting phenomenon in China that involves both adults and students that are too shy to get caught in a conversation but still want to show off their English skills to their friends by hollering ‘hello’ as you have already passed them. If you turn towards them at all they will usually giggle and shrink away although sometimes they will relish the opportunity to engage in a conversation. No matter how long you are in China it is not uncommon when you meet someone for them to say, ‘Welcome to China! Happy every day!’.
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