LC2 Adventures at the Yuan Yang Rice Terraces!

During one of our free weekends in Kunming, China, we decided to visit the Yuan Yang rice terraces in the southern part of Yunnan Province, which are beautifully terraced fields of rice carved into the hillside by the Hani people. Yuan Yang is about a 7-hour bus ride from Kunming, where our study abroad program was based. We took an overnight sleeper bus there on Friday night so we would arrive early Saturday morning just in time to catch the sunrise. The Chinese sleeper buses we rode on were really something else! The beds were only long enough to fit a child and wide enough to fit a petite Chinese person, the sheets on the beds looked (and smelled) like they had not been washed in a while, and the floor was sticky. There was no air-conditioning and no concept of personal space on the bus.
When the bus arrived at the Yuan Yang bus terminal early on Saturday morning, the driver merely turned off the engine and did not let us know that we had arrived. Around 5:30am, we were rudely awakened by a small Chinese man who shined a flashlight in our faces and yelled at us in rapid Chinese about hiring a private van for the day. So, disheveled and half-asleep, we stumbled out of the bus to bargain with the man. It looked like our slight disorientation and grumpiness came in handy, as we got the price that we asked for.
The day started breaking as our van drove us through the Yuan Yang countryside, which was lush green and beautiful. The hills and rice terraces were shrouded in mist and fog early that morning. As the fog lifted and the sun rose, it was mesmerizing to stare at the beautifully carved hillsides scattered throughout with small huts, colorful villages, and corn patches. We felt really insignificant looking at the vast fields and majestic hills.
After spending some time at various rice terraces, we visited a weekly market in a small hillside town, where locals who lived on the hills and in the valleys gathered once a week to sell goods, shop for groceries, and socialize. The market was full of people shopping and gossiping with each other. It was very interesting to observe colorfully-dressed people of various Chinese minority groups, with baskets on their backs full of vegetables, cloth, baby chicks, or even piglets. It was also interesting to notice that although many of these farming people worked hard and lived simple lives, they were still content with their lives. After a full day at Yuan Yang, we took another sleeper bus and arrived in Kunming at 3:30am, ready to bargain (again) for a ride back into the city.
The Yuan Yang rice terraces were quite a sight to behold and it was wonderful to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city for a day. We enjoyed experiencing minority hillside culture in the market and spending some time in the serene and beautiful Chinese countryside. Despite minor setbacks along the way, we made it there and back safely, with lots of fun stories and experiences to share.

>>written by Lye-Ching and Lewis

Photos: 2 pictures of us at the Yuan Yang rice terraces in Yunnan Province, China. The other 2 pictures are from the Stone Forest and Tiger Leaping Gorge, which are also in Yunnan Province, China.

Anastasia in Hong Kong

After I finished my internship, I moved north away from the city center, staying in the dorms at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in the Sha Tin district. The university campus is much bigger than that of UTD and is located on a hillside, such that I have to take the bus to and from class. There are also elevators in the buildings, taking you from the top of the hill to the bottom, making the campus a big game of chutes and ladders.

I took two business classes: Asian Business and Management, Engineering and Technology Management. The classes have been great, and we’ve had several group projects. I got to work with people from Britain, Canada, Korea, and Mainland China. As part of the Tech Management class, we took a field trip to the Science Park and visited the RFID Center, where we learned about radio frequency identification technology – the kind that Walmart hopes to implement in coming years.

As part of the cultural program at CUHK, I have taken two trips. One was a local boat trip to give the students a tour of the nearby islands. We visited a fishing village and small temple, had a seafood lunch, and then explored amazing rock formations on another island’s beach. The second trip was at the very end of my stay, and I just got back. We toured Beijing for three days, visiting the Olympic stadium, Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City, Great Wall, and several other smaller sites. The most beautiful, in my opinion, was the Forbidden City – the center of Beijing, which only the royalty was allowed to enter: the tiered, carved, and embellished golden-colored roofs were stunning, overlapping into the distance.

Now that it is time to leave, I feel like I am leaving a new home. I have finally gotten to know the city, made friends, and gotten into a daily routine. Most of all, I will miss the friends I made here – the expats, the locals, and the other tourists. Especially I will miss my roommate, who was from Mainland China. We didn’t communicate for a while, until one evening we launched into a long discussion. She would ask me questions about the U.S., and I would point out the differences. Some of the things we learned in class were very relevant. For example, she isn’t able to use Facebook or Google, which are not available in China. Instead, she uses the Chinese search engine Baidu, which my group researched for our final essay in Asian Management.

I have learned a lot about the local culture that will help me in my future career, and I would love to return to Asia for work or leisure. Before, I had only called St. Petersburg and Dallas home, but I would now be willing to add Hong Kong to that list.

¡Hasta Luego Costa Rica!

Some places people travel are life-changing. For me, Costa Rica has been life improving. Two months of Spanish language courses, two months of weekend travels, two months of living with a Costa Rican family, and two months of planning my days according to what I intrinsically had a desire to do most certainly set my daily routine on a delightful path. It’s difficult not to make the most of each day when my host mother cooked delicious food and then asked me at each meal what I did yesterday, how I liked it, and what I was planning on doing today.
My meal-time musings ended up taking me to a couple beaches and beautiful mountain sights. It turns out a on the southern tip of the Peninsula of Nicoya there is a beach town that reminds me of a neighborhood that could be found in Austin. Organic food and live music in a town set in between three waterfalls and wide stretches of beach. When I made my way to mountain landmarks, with bus rides were reminiscent of roller coasters, I could not help but marvel at the landscape. A striking attraction is called Rio Celeste, a river on the side of a volcano with minerals that turn the water opaque blue. Hiking a progressively harder trail leads to waterfalls and hot springs. It’s not every day the social norm is to strip down to a swimsuit, relax in a hot spring, and talk to traveling Spaniards, Germans, Americans, and Costa Ricans about their travels.
Many things I encountered would not constitute a typical day back in the States. Many more can in fact be replicated once I return but I’ve come to associate with Costa Rica. I will miss winding bus rides through the mountains, spinning classes in Spanish, the occasional “tranquila mi amor” when I am unsure of what to do, the delicious coffee, the delicious food, the helpful strangers, and most of all the “Pura Vida” attitude.
So, I will fight the urge to perpetually live in paradise and make it to my retun flight home. This will not be easy, and I can only console myself in saying “Hasta luego Costa Rica! Yo regresaré.”

(The picture is at Rio Celeste.)

Lye-Ching and Lewis in China

It's nearing our fourth week in China, and needless to say, the experience has been nothing short of spectacular. We're on the bus right now in the middle of a seven-hour bus ride back to Dali from Shangrila, with our fellow intrepid travelers asleep around us. Looking out the window, it seems as though we were plucked from Dallas and sent on a journey through a post card, with gorgeous landscapes rolling past as the bus careens around curves and up mountains. Our bus driver handles his bus like a Nascar speedster, and oftentimes we feel like we're riding a rollercoaster.
Our first few weeks were a combination of exploration and classes. During the week, our daily regimen included morning Taiji with a twenty-four style master in the small park next to our hotel. After thorough exercise of our Qi (often with locals stopping to gawk at the foreigners or other tourists stopping to take pictures), we go to the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) Hospital to have our language classes. Our classes are small and are geared towards the level that our Chinese is at-I (Lye Ching) am in a class of two and I (Lewis) am in a class by myself. Chinese is immediately followed by morning lecture, a lunch break, and then afternoon lecture. Our lectures have covered ranges of topics, including basic theories of traditional Chinese medicine, Daoism, massage, maternal and child healthcare, HIV in Yunnan, and the Chinese healthcare system. Our lecturers are doctors, professors, and researchers, and their knowledge about their subjects has been a wonderful resource. Afternoons after lecture generally involve going out to explore the city, trying to find yet another amazing restaurant for dinner, and then settling down for the evening-whether it's hanging out at the hotel, chilling at a bar near Green Lake Park, or heading out for clubbing.
Of course, one of the biggest things we have to mention is the food-the food here is amazing, and the group that we hang out with has been blessed with an adventurous palate, making meals both simple and exciting. We've explored hole-in-the-wall restaurants as well as nicer ones recommended by locals, and we have never been disappointed by the cuisine. Many of the restaurants we've explored are run by different minority groups (there are 26 different minority groups in Yunnan), so we've been able to taste all sorts of styles of cooking. Food is cheap too-it's possible to get full meals complete with a drink and pay less than the price of a vending machine soda in the United States. Insane. Vegetables and meat are also fresh and not processed, making dishes remarkably delicious and our stomachs happy. Going back to the U.S. and paying "normal" prices again for meals is going to be both unfortunate and depressing. Our visits to restaurants are supplemented by visits to convenience stores and different bakeries to stock up on snacks, carbs, and water. We also raid fruit markets, buying mangoes, peaches, plums, bananas, liches, dragon-eyes, oranges, apples, and pineapples-amongst other things. Our stash of food becomes late-night snacks while working on Chinese homework or hanging out.
Kunming is an enormous city-the population has tripled in the past ten years and it's pushing a population of 8-9 million people. Our hotel is in an extremely convenient location-five minutes from the hospital and from both the Bird and Flower Market and Green Lake Park. Whether we haggle in the market or ride bumper cars at Green Lake Park, there hasn't been a shortage of activities for us to do. One thing that has been a great experience is English Corner-a spontaneous gathering of locals, students, and travelers on the outside of Green Lake Park on Thursday evenings. Essentially, it is a coming-together for people who want to practice their English with whomever, and when our group of twenty students arrived the first night, we became magnets for the Chinese. It was as we were told-the foreign-looking students would be "pop stars," and those who could speak both Mandarin and English were "treasures." We chatted about anything and everything-from books and movies to America's economy and politics, and sometimes even random questions such as, "Does Lady Gaga wear trousers?" or "If you slept with multiple women, would your girlfriend break up with you?" One of the other activities that we were given to explore Kunming was a drop-off activity on our second day. The group was divided into five teams of four, with the captains being those with Chinese proficiency (we were both leaders of our respective groups), and then handed some money as well as a slip of paper with a location on it (written in Chinese of course). Each group was then sent on its merry way to find its way to their mystery destination, and we reconvened back at the hotel later in the afternoon to share our adventures. It was certainly an experience, and both of our groups had a great time figuring out how to enlist the help of locals in determining how to get where we needed to be as well as spending time at our final destination (The ancient city of Guan Du and the Bamboo Temple).
We haven't limited adventures to Kunming, however. We've explored the Western Hills near Kunming, walked through Hua Ting Temple and climbed up to the Dragon's Gate and even further to the Sky Pavilion, where we could see the vast expanse of Kunming from above. We've visited Shi Ling (The Stone Forest)--climbing up, around, and through enormous rock pillars and formations, the remnants of an ancient seabed. The second weekend, we visited Jiu Xiang, caverns near-ish to Kunming (and by near we mean two and a half hours by bus and shady van transportation). The caverns were stunning, and we hiked a trail through the caves and amongst the stalagtites and stalagmites. Everything was lit with rainbow lights, making the formations look both beautiful and eerily odd at the same time.
Apart from our Kunming adventures, we also went on a week-long excursion following our midterm, which has been amazing. We went to Dali, Lijiang, Shaxi, and Shangrila. We have had adventures with bargaining, delicious food, and beautiful landscapes. We witnessed the commercial tourism that swallowed Lijiang, the calm and picturesque rural town of Shaxi, and had yak butter tea in Shangrila. Our adventures included a homestay with the cutest host families ever, looking at stars underneath the Shaxi sky, watching a pig get slaughtered by a rural family before morning market, and watching a Dongba ceremony. The past week has been a whirlwind of activity, and the excitement has yet to subside. At the moment, however, everyone is worn out and passed out on the bus, though doubtless everyone will be up and alert soon once we stop for lunch. This trip has been amazing thus far, and we’re only halfway through! Stay posted for another update!

Andrews thoughts of Argentina

I can not believe how efficient I was this trip. When I arrived and was still learning how to use the colectivos or buses in Buenos Aires I was almost positive that my entire study abroad would be composed of waking up, running to get class, spending my time inside the classroom, and returning back home to eat dinner and sleep. While I did end up spending a significant portion of my time doing those things, I also made sure to travel on the weekends and to visit as many museums and try as many new things in Buenos Aires as possible. By the fourth week I had traversed the country. I had spent a weekend in Northern Argentina near the border with Brazil and Paraguay where I went to see Iguazu falls. I had also traveled to the southern tip of the country in Patagonia where I went with Anna and Saskia to see the glaciers in Calafate. In Buenos Aires, I had visited the Museum of Latin American Art, the Xul Solar Museum, The Barolo Palace, the Plaza de Mayo, Congress, and the Eva Duarte Museum. Through the culture and identity class taught by Dr. Demello, I had the opportunity to study Argentine society. I attended lectures from human rights professors and anthropologists and researched and afterwards wrote four essays on topics such as the Dirty War, the art of Xul Solar, and the differences between the urban immigrant population and the rural indigenous and criollo populations in the country. I hope that other students take this trip in the future. I was a little hesitant at the beginning because while other students were participating in internships or taking classes, I was hard pressed to show how the trip related to my future career interests or educational goals. But looking back, I realized how immature my thinking was. This trip was one of personal growth and discovery. It still amazes me how much I learned about Buenos Aires and Argentine society when I was down there. And although the program lasted only one month, I feel that there were so many resources and opportunities available to students that wanted to experience as much as possible while they were in Argentina.