She has safely arrived in Kunming, Yunnan province, and here is her first email:

Hi mom and dadda,

I’m here! The Internet is really dodgy in my apartment and I have to write an email and then walk around the room before I can send it. I’m going to go to a cafe today, but we think because it’s a mac the system isn’t that comparable.

I had a very interesting flight. I cried as soon as I reached my gate and tried to hide it, but couldn’t. I had so many Chinese people staring at me. I loaded on the plane and slept almost the entire flight. The tiny Chinese man sitting next to me fell asleep on my shoulder and I was too lazy to tell him to move. It was pretty cute, except his breathe was STANKY.

In Hong Kong I met an Aussie fellow who was coming to Yunnan to film and document a ten-day charity bike ride through rural China, run by non other than the Jane Goddall Roots and Shoots Beijing. I helped edit some of the pamphlets for this charity bike ride last year during my intern. I really want to go on it, but I have class starting in a few days. Anyways, he was very nice and taught me all sorts of stuff about my camera. Small world.

I arrived and got picked up by Josh’s wife Naoko who is Japanese and lived in China for at least ten years. She is fluent in mandarin and English. Very nice. She moved me into my apartment which is two bedrooms and Naoko’s office where she treats patients during the week. I live with a 40-ish German lady who has been a TCM doctor for years. Everyone here is already a doctor, practiced for years, and is now brushing up on some skills. For example, the man who moved out of my room just before I arrived is name Brody. He’s a crazy Canadian, huge beard, strange necklaces, big round glasses, and a loud distinct laugh. He’s dyslexic and told me about how hard it is to study, well anything, being that way-but in particular TCM. He is here learning emergency acupuncture. What to do if someone is bleeding severely, or going into shock etc. It’s quite amazing the people here. And most of all they are all so excited to have me just starting. Brody just went on and on about how this is really going to change my view of well being and life. I told Bridget (my housemate) that my back was hurting and she starting rubbing acupuncture points in my leg and hand. About five minutes later my lower back felt much more relaxed. I could get used to this.

My room is really nice. Big, wooden floors, little nook to read next to my large glass window. The view is of many other apartment buildings and the mountains that surround Yunnan. I always hear traffic, but it doesn’t bother me. The air is clean, the sky blue, and people seem much happier than in Beijing.

I met up with my friend, Tai, who was my RA in Beijing. He’s living with two other friends from the States and they are all teaching English. They live about 15min bike ride from me, right next to the green lake. The green lake is what I remember most of Kunming. It’s a decent sized lake, the color of jade, that has many different islands, walkways, and platforms. Basically it’s a haven for all Chinese past times. Tai and I after getting delicious jiaozi (dumplings) and a one hour massage for five dollars, walked around the lake. Everyone was there. Grandmas and Grandpas were gathered around in every corner playing cards, Chinese checkers (different from the star shaped board we know), playing instruments (a lot of reed flutes), dancing (country, unusual line dancing, and some sort of hand dance), loudly debating about something, and of course staring shamelessly at my blond locks. It was extremely crowded. Some of the gatherings were no less than 100 people, but they all were just sitting, listening, relaxing.

The pace of life is much more layed back, and even though there are high rises and many people, there is still a village feeling. There are very few foreigners and the ex pat community is not an isolated bubble like in Beijing. Most foreigners speak mandarin, and are here because they WANT to be part of the community. They are not condescending to the locals the way so many butt heads in Beijing were. I’m already getting to know the woman who sells roses outside of our complex, and the guard who watches the bikes.

The diversity among the people is amazing. Most people are dressed in comfortable clothes, a t shirt and jeans. Very few are all dolled up and wearing heals the way Beijingers were. The people themselves all look so different, and in my opinion are much more beautiful than Han Chinese. South Asian is very exotic. Some have freckles, some really dark skin, and they are on average much shorter than Han Chinese. There are quite a few Tibetans around, and they are not hard to miss. They are dressed the same, but there faces are so distinct. Darker skin usually and wider faces. Of course I’m not sure, they could be a mix of other bordering countries as well. Some people are wearing traditional minority clothing and it’s beautiful. I believe they are some sort of Tibetan group. I’ll let you know once I do.

Yunnan is the best place to be in China if you want to travel. You can take a bus for thirty US dollars to Vietnam and probably cheaper to Burma. Tibet is just above me, and I’m just itching to get up there. Sichuan is practically free. I’m going to have some good weekend trips. Tai and I are already scheming, and I’m trying to get Dana to come visit.

My first Tai Qi class starts Sunday morning, and my full schedule starts Monday. I have a few days now to buy groceries, explore, read, do college apps, try to fix my Internet, and get a couple more massages:)

I hope everything at home is good. You guys are so beautiful. I’m such a lucky girl. My last dinner was amazing-I’m still nibbling on the brownies. Take care of Phoebe, and I hope Snakey had a smooth ascension to her next life.

Lots of Love,
Rach

Hi Everyone!

The last few weeks have been wonderful. Last weekend we went hiking along the great wall, slept in a village along the wall, and woke up at four in the morning to hike (in the dark) to the highest guard post and watch the sunrise. It was one of the most breathtaking views I’ve ever seen. There were already two Chinese photographers that had slept the night on the wall and were taking pictures of the slow transition from red to orange then purple to blue. The sky was extremely clear and I could easily see hundreds of miles of the wall, the surrounding mountains, and the endless rolling hills below.

Unfortunately IES has some learning to do in terms of organizing trips. Besides for the scenery and the few moments I had on my own, the hike was quite miserable. I ended up carrying a girl’s duffel bag and fur jacket, and lent my shoes to a girl that had shown up in stylish flats. The program gave no list, warning, or any sort of preparation. Most of these kids had never hiked in their lives. I even pointed out to one of the “leaders” before we left campus that someone showed up with a duffel bag and fur coat and has never hiked before. He simply replied, “We’ll figure it out”. That’s the last I heard from him. I’ve never seen such incompetence in leaders and so much whining from kids. Grrr…

However this weekend I decided to do my own thing. Katherine, my good friend from California, and I went hiking on a different portion of the great wall. I found a hiking group called Beijing Hikers in my Lonely Planet that goes on hikes in the surrounding areas around Beijing. It’s mainly ex-pats from the ages of 30-60 on the hike, which meant an easy pace and interesting conversation. I met a really nice lady, Edie, who just moved to Beijing and works for the UN agriculture and food organization. Although she’s at least ten years older then me, I really can relate to her and enjoy her company. We’re having dinner in Nan Luo Gu Xiang-a nice local boutique area tomorrow. I also met a journalist who helped Katherine and I figure out our Tibet plans. We can’t go in, but she told us of surrounding areas that are equally as wild with zero tourists. The hike itself was fun with gorgeous scenery. I think I’ll be doing more hikes with these guys.

On a different note, life here is starting to shift from that of a long-term tourist, to short term resident. I’ve become less awkward at using my mandarin to communicate and I’m also starting to really get the hang of moving around this city. I have my (not so reliable) bike that I use to go to class, bike to the Chaoshifa (supermarket), and bike to different local places for meals. Of course I’m still scared to death of crossing the roads and try to avoid it at all cost.  I’ve also become dependent on the subway and bus system here, which is so convenient. I now feel confident getting around the city on my own-it only took two months!

I’ve also made some cool Chinese friends, which is actually very hard. On campus I have many “friends” but they are just people eager to learn English and are very pushy when it comes to our friendship-constantly calling me to meet because they have presents for me etc. I’ve learned my lesson and don’t meet with these people anymore. I do have a legitimate friend and her English name is Nikki. She is very open to talk about anything. Tibet, press freedom, propaganda, communism, lack of sexual education, and women’s rights are all topics that she doesn’t mind discussing. She is in fact very open-minded. I’m really enjoying her company, and she lets me speak in Chinese (when I can).

Classes here are good, but extremely challenging and take up all of my time. The first block (Chinese Media) just ended so I had a four-day weekend! Woohoo. Chinese class is still wonderful; my teacher is the cutest person in the world and really cares about us on a personal level. We are about to start our next block, which is Chinese History. It’s mobile learning so we have classes while traveling. We are gone for two weeks and visit Xian, Ya’nan, and Nanjing (which I have already briefly visited). I’m really excited to leave Beijing again and see some more of the country. We leave on Friday.

Last week we visited Sina.com and the People’s Daily (a huge newspaper, it was the main newspaper during the Cultural Revolution). As usual we got a tour of the place and an interview, but didn’t learn anything new. Most of the employees are Party members, the interview was basically him telling us how free Chinese media is (vomit) and how western newspapers have a lot to learn. There is so much Propaganda scattered throughout these visits.

I miss you all, you’re always crossing my mind, and I can’t wait to see you in December! Cheers!

Lots of Love,
Rachael

As I mentioned before there is very little international news here in the People’s Republic. So it’s harder for people to get any information and when they do it’s filtered by the governemnt. That being said most people are not aware of the candidates and if they have heard of them, they know them as: “the black man, the old man, and the women”. This I have heard several times. Several people have said they really don’t care what happens, they hope the person with the best policy’s regarding China wins. So no people here don’t care, and even if they did-it’s hard for them to get straight up information on the candidates without a little propoganda thrown in there. The college kids are the ones that know the most.
xxoo
P.S. good luck on your presentation Len, I hope they translate your lecture accurately. Make sure you don’t mention the Cultural Revolution, Mao, or the Party in any negative light…I’ve already been in a little trouble for that:)

Oh goody – another email from our Rachael. She’s back from Shanghai, after visiting the tallest building in China. I’m assuming it’s the one on the left, although Google says it is not quite finished. Pretty neat looking, huh? (Rachael’s email is just below).

Ni Hao family,

I have a little cold right now, so I’m in the dorm on my computer. Yesterday the pollution was worse than I’ve ever seen it! It looked like San Francisco on a really bad day, except instead of fog-smog! Gross.

I got back from Shanghai on Wednesday absolutely wiped! We left on Friday night and took a sleeper train there. We spent our time in Shanghai wisely. I had my Chinese media class one morning and the next day we had a field trip. We visited a local newspaper publishing house (China Youth Daily) and the Shanghai TV station. They were broadcasting live while we were there about China going to the moon..very exciting. It was quite an experience being able to visit both forms of media. TV is obviously dominating in terms of money and circulation. However, they are both equally regulated. Everything published and broadcasted must follow “Party Policy”. There is no questioning or criticism, which makes reading a newspaper and watching the news extremely boring. Not to mention every form of media covers the same stories: China goes in Space, Olympics, Olympics, Milk Scandal….blah blah.

I also asked the editor in Chief what he liked about his job, and what he would change. This was a sugar coated form of, “what’s wrong with the system?”. He went on and on about how great the lifestyle is, and how proud and respected he is to have that position. He ignored the second part, so I asked again,” What would you change?” and he responded (in Chinese),”I don’t have time to think about that.” He had been working there for ten years! This mindset is very common. I met with a university student in Shanghai and also had a conversation about the media. She was very liberal in most things, but when I asked if she would try to change the system if she got a job in the media, she responded, “I would be too happy and proud to have that job, why would I want to risk it?”.

We visited the Bund (the area on the water surrounding the city), the French Concession, The Shanghai art Museum, and of course the largest building in Asia!! We paid and went to the top of it, to get the most beautiful view of Shanghai at night. It was 100 floors tall!

On the way back from Shanghai we went through Nanjing because we couldn’t get tickets directly back o Beijing. It was a national holiday this weekend, so everything was extremely crowded. The train station on the holiday was absolutely ridiculous!! It is very large (like a medium sized airport) and had lines out across the street to enter. Once we finally got into the building we had to wait about an hour for our train to arrive in a waiting room much larger than any airport terminal. Most people were sitting on the floors in the aisles. There were many different faces there. A lot of migrant workers going home for the holidays with small cloth bags and a wok. A lot of them had woks with them. There were also many Chinese tour groups with matching hats and a leader that would carry a flag with the same pattern as the hats. Most of these tour groups consisted of middle aged women and men very eager to get through the crowd. So we are all waiting for the gates to open, and as soon as they called it, chaos broke out. Hundreds of people swarmed, aggressively pushing and shoving to get through the door. I would be walking and then all of a sudden be elbowed in the gut by an eighty year old woman! Then before I knew it the Burberry hat tour group would trample me. Thank god some of my friends had blonde hair, it was easy to spot them! Once we were on the train all was good, very nice actually.

I’m back to the normal schedule now, which leaves little time for anything but school. I think we are going to the great wall this weekend of the weather permits it. I need to start my research project and college applications. So much to do, so little time!

I went to a huge French Wallmart-esq store called Carrefour and stocked up on good food! I’m getting a little sick of the food.ssshhh.
I must rest and kick this cold.
I love you guys and can’t wait to see you at Christmas!
Rach

Hi mom and dad and dj and phoebe and snakey,

My internet is down so i can’t use my computer in my room to skype or ichat you guys before I go to Shangai(three hours).

We are taking a sleeper train there, and should arrive manyana morning, early. We are visiting the CCTV(China Communist Television) station there. CCTV is the largest tv broadcasting and has over 10 stations on tv. we are also going to the workers daily headquarters-which is one of the largest newspapers distributed in China. I believe one of these bulidings is on the top ten tallest buildings in the world. We are visiting the largest though.

This is all for my media class, which is improving. Today we flipped through 33 of the China television stations to record who owned the station and what was being shown. There was not one station with international news, and only about three were news related channels. And even then they were covering two stories: China in Space, Baby milk crisis! The rest of the channels were mainly soap operas and period drama’s ( set at least 50 years ago). It’s funny how the sitcoms work. They are allowed to have modern drama’s, and drama’s that take place during the safe time periods (the time periods that the tone has already been set for). Any time between 1966-1976 is not allowed-too controversial. In fact I’ve been asking people about the cultural revolution, they either don’t know or don’t want to talk about it.

I knew life and media was closly monitored here-but it’s to such a large extent! Even if people here want to know about the rest of the world, it’s close to impossible to find news on it. And even within China there are three stories covered on every news source- Olympics, Olympics, baby milk, space launch, olympics, olympics. TV is so boring here. It’s better than it was 30 years ago-then there were two newspapers and one magazine for the entire nation. Other news sources had to copy word for word what the “example” news would say. I just want some weeds or nip tuck or something that’s not a Tang dynasy soap  opera! Oh and there was one more thing on TV-smoking monkeys. Apparantly monkeys at zoos here have been given cigarettes to calm their nerves and are now addicted-oh China, classy.

One more story. As I mentioned before they have very little access to outside news, therefore no close to nothing about the elections in the US. We asked many many people if they knew who McCain and Obama were and we got blank faces. But when we said black man, and white man they knew exactly who we were talking about.

So Shanghai should be good times. I miss you all so much and want to talk to you (especially DJ). Dana don’t throw too much of a rager…the plants might die.I don’t think I’ll be able to email you from there, so I ‘ll talk to you all in five days.
Love you sooo so much!

Hello everyone!

I finally have a free day (Saturday) so thought I would send an update.

So much is happening! This morning I had breakfast with mom’s friend Karen who is a professor at UCSB and head of the China division of Kodak. She was here on business and planted so many good ideas in my head. Part of the curriculum here is you choose a research topic and spend all four months working on it. You have to use first hand sources-meaning interviews, translating Chinese articles, emailing Chinese companies etc. Basically they really want you to figure out the Chinese perspective of your topic. She suggested that I investigate a company called Solar Tech. It’s a Chinese started and run business that makes solar energy products. I haven’t done any research, but it’s a huge company and I’m really excited about it! She knows all the big cheeses there, so I’m getting the hook ups.

My Modern history class just ended and I’m about to start Chinese Media in transition. I absolutely loved my history professor, and I’m hoping my next teacher measures up. So far I’m really happy with the faculty here. I’d say they are Cate quality if not better.

I’m also competing in a badminton tournament. I haven’t played that much, but I picked it up pretty fast and I think we have a chance for victory! The game is scored in Chinese, and if you speak English on the court people look down on you. All of the language professors are competing in the tournament as well.

The first day I moved into my room Katherine, my good friend, and I were lost trying to find a bus. A man came up to us and asked, in English, if we needed help. He ended up being a very nice anthropologist who is trying to open his own museum. He travels all over the country collecting artifacts. Anyways, he took us to the Capital museum (John, have you been there?) because it was the last day of a “5,000 years of Chinese history” display. The museum itself was one of the largest buildings I’ve ever been in. In fact all of the buildings here are incredibly large! The exhibit was really nice, and he was very knowledgeable about most of the artifacts. A lot of the pieces we were looking at were in his secondary school history books! The only bad thing about the museum was the number of people. In order to look at an old calligraphy parchment, you had to literally push and shove to get close enough to read it. I get reminded everyday that there are actually a billion-plus people here!

Another story: I went to the Paralympics! I found tickets online for 30 kuai ($5) so all of us decided to go! It took about three hours and three different banks to locate the tickets, but it was all worth it. It’s funny when you are asking for directions here, not just one person answers-there is a committee meeting about where the bank is. Even if no one knows where it is they say, “nai biar” (over there) in order to save “face”. The same phenomena happen at banks. If the teller you are with doesn’t know how to do your particular transaction, they will say that the bank can’t do it. Not that they can’t do it. Also to save “face”. This made getting the tickets a bit of a rat race. But we saw the end of the men’s marathon, which they do in three-wheeled speed machines. Their upper bodies were huge and they came racing in at very high speeds! Also, the shows in between events involved handicapped entertainers. There would be 60 wheelchairs making formations of lotus flowers in the Olympic stadium-it was great! The audience, as opposed to the water polo match I went to, was almost all Chinese-so the atmosphere was very different. It seemed less chaotic; I think a big part of it is that Chinese don’t usually attend spectator sports like this, so they didn’t really know what to do. They also didn’t drink at the Paralympics, but the Russian, Australian, German and British spectators did at the water polo game.

Things are exciting and rewarding here. I feel very comfortable with the people and the culture. I’m looking forward to learning and experiencing what this magical place has to offer. I never thought I’d say that about polluted Beijing, but it really is beautiful. I feel pleasantly energized!

I’m going to Shanghai next weekend, which I’m looking forward to! I’ll let you know all about it….
Bye for now
Lots of Love,
rachael

So this is very cool. The last two or three mornings Caren turns on her Apple laptop, gets a program called iChat going, and voila! Rachael appears on her screen. They can see and talk to each other (each laptop has a little camera facing its user), and it is all free. The time zones are good, too: Caren is still in bed, just about to get up, and Rachael is in bed, about to go to sleep. Sure beats the telephone!

Rachael uploaded a bunch of pictures, the first of which is here (to see them all, go to Shutterfly).