The Melting Pot

It's funny how my life here in China has changed since last year. When I was living up in Baoding, I was going through a series of Chinese experiences, sometimes like little explosions of cultural learning. From time to time, little things in my life kept reminding me that I truly was in China.

And now, here in Kunming, my life just *is*. Often it feels like it doesn't belong to any particular place at all.

The thing about Kunming that makes life here different from Baoding, is the cultural variety that we get. Being near the border, there is much more of foreign influence from nearby countries. And the Western presence here is on a completely different scale here. You can see white faces anywhere, in the traffic, in the markets, in the webcafes (I can see quite a few around me right now!)... And you can have your pizza (and not chinese style!) and cappuccino in the Western cafes near our university, or go and listen to a Danish jazzband in an artgallery near where I live. But at the same time, you can go to the market just around the cornet from the gallery and you'll definitely feel like being in China, with all the noise and smells and pushing and arguing over the prices ;)

So, it's a wonderful mixture of a lot of different things and cultures. It's what makes life here easy and much less challenging than being in a 100% Chinese environment.

But it also results in me going through my days like floating down the river, not making a lot of cultural observations or being hit by those little explosions.

...which in turn results in my blog slowing down and becoming incresingly uninteresting....ehhhh ;-P