My Travel Adventures

I recently found out that Yunnan is the location of Shangri-La, which, as every good tourist brought up on Tintin and Scooby Doo will realise, I am now obligated to visit. Never mind the fact that the city, formerly known as Zhongdian, was renamed to Shangri-La in 2001 to attract tourists. The pictures look nice and I get to say I’ve been to the mythical lost paradise to wow other sock-and-sandal-wearing westerners.

Instead of going to class on Friday morning, all of the students in my program were sent to the hospital for a check-up. Apparently, this is a requirement for people intending to stay in Yunnan for a longer period of time, which, as students at a summer language study session, I suppose we are. Not an inch of anyone’s body was spared. We gave urine samples and blood samples, went through X-rays, dental checks, and ultrasounds, and the female students in the group all had to see a gynaecologist. Should the hospital ever decide to make wax dolls of us all, I trust it will do a very good job of it, for now it knows my body much better than I do.

In retrospect, my first weekend in Kunming was quite relaxed, though it certainly did not seem so at the time. We were given several lectures on navigating CET policies, managing culture shock, etc., and we took part in activities to get to know each other better. The most daunting policy, of course, was CET’s language pledge – a promise not to speak any English, or rather (after one rather nitpicky back-and-forth) not to speak any language besides Mandarin Chinese. I think most students confronted the language pledge with a mixture of dread and determination, though there were a couple students in whose expressions one could only read the first. As for me, I had participated in a Chinese language pledge program as a complete beginner two years ago, so I approached the policy with a sentiment of “it can’t be worse than that time I could not talk to anyone.”

Many aspects of this summer have been unprecedented. For one, I have not had a healthy sleeping schedule since the weekend of graduation until my arrival in Kunming – a total of three exhausting weeks. My under-eight-hours-sleep life began with my parents’ arrival on campus and the imminent horror of having to pack all of my belongings, half of which were to be sent home with my parents, and half of which were to remain in storage. My subsequent travel across three continents did not help my sleep deprivation much.