Examinations and Excursions

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.

To add insult to injury, upon our return to school, we were given our weekly exam, though admittedly we were allowed to take it home. The day was not all bad, however. At the beginning of the week, I had reached out to one of my Chinese teachers from Yale, Sun Laoshi, to plan a meal, as she is a native of the city. We eventually put together a group of all three of her Yale students currently in Kunming, and we ate dinner at a quaint restaurant above Cuihu Lake.

At the restaurant with Sun Laoshi

The next day, CET organised an excursion to the nearby Qiongzhu Temple, a place of worship renowned for its 500 arhats. I wandered off for a bit and climbed a small hill above the temple. Following a dusty trail, I arrived at what I later found out were the graves of the temple’s abbots, as well as a statue of a rhinoceros in the middle of a pond green with algae. Legend has it that hundreds of years ago, a couple of young aristocrats on a hunt chased a rhinoceros all the way up the mountain where it suddenly disappeared. One of them planted his spear at the spot where the rhino was last seen, planning to return, but when the party came back the next day, the spear had turned into a bamboo forest. The temple consequently derives its name from bamboo, and rhinoceroses can be found in many of the details of the structure’s decorations.   

 A lion statue outside Qiongzhu Temple

 An outdoor replica of two arhat statues (it is not permitted to take pictures of the interior)

 A marble railing with miniature elephants

 Another statue outside of Qiongzhu Temple

 A miniature pagoda in front of a portal

 The legendary rhino on the wall of the temple

 The inner courtyard of Qiongzhu Temple

 The grave of an abbot

 A statue of the legendary rhino in the middle of a pond

 A colonnade inside Qiongzhu Temple

 An inventive way of continuing a colonnade across differences in altitude

 At the back courtyard of Qiongzhu Temple

 A slightly crude elephant

 The roof of Qiongzhu Temple

 I think this is meant to be a panda, but I would have guessed gopher had it not been for the bamboo.

 A miniature stone pagoda

CET in front of Qiongzhu Temple

At lunch in the temple 

A Buddhist banner on the hill outside Qiongzhu Temple

 The view from a nearby hill

 Another view with Dianchi Lake in the distance

 Another temple on the mountain opposite

Hill flowers

A friend's picture of me

CET climbing the hill above Qiongzhu

My student life has not developed substantially since last week, so I will limit myself to copying down two notes I made to myself in the school-provided notepad on my nightstand:

-        In my class, I feel like a bad bassoonist in a room full of professional piccolo players.

-        I have invented a new game today: I hide the toilet paper roll before room service comes so they don’t leave us with less than four segments.