Spring is coming!

The daily bursts of firecrackers, a few shops closed already so that their owners can make the sometimes long journey back to visit their families and, today at least, the warm (-ish) sunshine are all pointing to Chinese New Year and Spring Festival. The actual date depends, like Easter, on the phases of the moon and this year it’s quite early - the year of the Ox begins on January 26.
It’s a Chinese tradition to visit the family for Spring Festival, so Judy’s school is on holiday and we are planning to visit our family in UK. We fly to London via Bangkok on Tuesday, 20th. It will be great to see them all again. After a few days with Philippa and family in London, it’s back to Gloucestershire to see family and friends in Tewkesbury and Cheltenham.
Andrew Hay (it’s his flat we live in here) is back for another visit from Norway before taking his 93 year old mother on a trip to Antarctica. Andrew’s grandfather was on of the party which found the bodies of Scott and the group who died on their polar expedition. Andrew’s mother is keen to visit her father’s base hut while she still can.
Andrew is continuing his work on water purification devices for Myanmar where many people are still having to drink polluted water. Peter is continuing to assist with building the devices, although we are currently reassessing priorites for future work.
The arrival of spring means that the bees will be getting busy and Peter is hoping to have more opportunities to work with several farm projects which are keen to include beekeeping in what they do.

Sunday lunch with Andrew, Judy and a duck.

Xishuangbanna

Xishuangbanna is in Yunnan, the same province as Kunming and is only 300 miles away (40 minutes by air). But how different from Kunming! Because it is further south and at a lower altitude, January in Jinghong, where we stayed, is like mid-June in a good English summer. T-shirts and sandals instead of thermal underwear.

It was a real treat to sit outside a cafe on the evening of January 1st and enjoy the warmer temperature. We ordered chicken cooked in coconut (expecting chicken cooked in coconut milk on a plate) but it really was chicken cooked in a hollowed out coconut - no wonder the waitress looked baffled when we said we’d like chips with it (it would have been really tricky to get them into the coconut!) Our most surreal eating experience was ‘The George and Dragon’ (you can probably guess the nationality of the owner!) Peter enjoyed a freshly made chicken pie while we watched the early years of the Beatles appearing on ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ on dvd.
It sounds as though we spent all our time eating, but we did manage to fit in some trips as well. Having watched ‘Wild China’ (brilliant BBC series, with lots of pictures of Yunnan) Judy was keen to go to Wild Elephant Valley, even though we knew our chances of seeing a wild elephant was slim. There are warning signs to drive slowly because of elephants crossing the road, which we thought made the deer signs in the Forest of Dean look a bit tame. Our driver bowled along at a good speed, so we were quite relieved not to meet any elephants (wild or tame) before we got to the park. The visit started with an elephant show (which helps to pay for the upkeep of the wildlife park). The elephants went around the arena, selling bags of bananas to the audience and collecting the money. We were impressed by the nifty way they held the money in the crease of their trunks, while doling out bananas and transferring bananas from trunk to mouth at the same time.

After lunch (not bananas) we toured the animal park, bird enclosure and butterfly house (see the picture) and took a 2 km cable car ride across the rain forest. Then we walked back through the forest, looking for the elephants, but only seeing footprints and elephant dung. There are 70 wild elephants living in a huge area of rain forest and they were far too smart to be seen by us! However, we did see gibbons in the trees who put on a spectacular show of swinging from branch to branch (black gibbons are native to southern Yunnan).






Which leaf is the butterfly?






Our tour guide spoke very little English, but we were very lucky to have a lovely young couple from Beijing with us, who kindly stayed with us and translated lots of information for us.


On Sunday morning we went to the bus station and took the local bus to the town of Menghai where there was a market. The drive through the mountains was fascinating as we passed rice fields and amazing terracing on the steep hillsides. There were people from different tribal groups at the market, so it was lovely to see their colourful costumes. The choice of fruit and vegetables was wonderful, and there was one honey seller although Peter had hoped to see more. (Yes, that is a Pepsi bottle being filled with honey for sale.)


We were back in Jinghong by lunchtime, and enjoyed meeting up with some western friends in the afternoon.

We spent Monday afternoon walking around the beautiful botanical gardens. Lots of interesting tropical plants and trees, including a working rubber plantation where we could see the white fluid dripping from the trees into the collection cups. The gardens are a favourite spot for wedding pictures and we saw a number of couples posing for the camera.
Xishuangbanna is the home of the Dai people who are apparently related to the Thai. The road signs are trilingual - Dai, Chinese and English. In fact it’s more like Thailand than China.
We’re now back in Kunming with only two weeks to go before we go back to UK for the Chinese New Year holiday. We’re feeling the cold here but reports of the big freeze in England (and in northern China) make us realise just how well off we are!

Cold Turkey

Judy invited a few of her colleagues from school to share Christmas dinner with us on the evening of Christmas day. She had been planning to cook a turkey but our little oven just wasn’t big enough, so we ordered a freshly cooked one from The Wicker Basket, a local shop/restaurant/bakery which supplies roast turkeys for American Thanksgiving as well as for Christmas. We collected it piping hot while the vegetables, stuffing, etc. were cooking at home or in the kitchen of a flat two floors above us which a friendly Dutch couple had kindly made available.
Judy’s home-made Christmas pudding, complete with flaming brandy and silver threepenny piece, was declared by one guest to be the best she had ever had (Peter is writing this bit!). The home-made mincemeat was also a great success. We took some mince pies along to the staff Christmas meal on Christmas Eve, thinking that the Chinese members of staff would be unlikely to eat this strange British invention. Wrong! The pies disappeared almost immediately.
Most of the CDs and videos in the shops here are what we would call pirate copies, so Peter had tried to download a legal copy of a "Carols from King’s" album from Amazon, only to get a message that their terms of use did not allow downloads outside the UK. No wonder the pirates flourish! However, our daughter Philippa kindly downloaded and emailed no less than 25 of the carols for us, so we and our guests have been enjoying them.
Chinese DVDs are full of surprises. We recently tried to watch a British film whose cover was printed in English but whose soundtrack turned out to be in . . . . .. Spanish!! And the cover for "Let there be Blood" describes it as "A biright (sic) and breezy romantic comedy"!!
We have now discovered that we can listen to BBC Radio 4 online quite a lot of the time. We are 8 hours ahead of UK time, so it’s a bit strange waking up to the midnight news and listening to "Sailing By" at the beginning of the working day. Peter thought he would be able to enjoy listening to Test Match Special, but was thwarted by another "Only available in UK" message. Surely many ex-pat Brits would love to listen to TMS far from home? On the bright side, we have become regular Archers fans (Peter heard the very first episode as a boy!).
We plan to spend the first few days of the New Year (Western New Year, not Chinese) in Xishuangbanna. It’s in the same province as Kunming but further south and lower down so we are expecting to enjoy warmer weather there. Unpack those T-shirts and sandals again! Not that the weather here has been that cold. No snow or frost in Kunming, unlike much of China which is literally freezing now. However, we’ll probably experience proper winter weather during our Chinese New Year visit to UK next month. (The Year of the Ox starts on January 26th.)
The turkey is nearly all gone now. The traditional Boxing Day turkey sandwiches and turkey blanquette took care of that.
This will be our last blog entry for 2008. We wish you all the best in 2009.

Christmas is coming!!

Less than two weeks to Christmas Day and Judy is busy making mincemeat, Christmas puddings, etc. Her school Christmas dinner is on Christmas Eve and on the evening of the 25th we have invited some of her colleagues to join us for a meal, but it will be strange not to be doing many of the important things we usually do on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Many Chinese now celebrate Christmas with Christmas trees, decorations, etc. even though they don’t know the reason for it.


Robert, who runs the school will be away for a while and has asked Peter to take a couple of lessons for him while he is away. This is supposed to include "Christmas activities" although Peter is not too sure what that means in China!
We are not able to send Christmas cards this year but we hear that a number of cards and letters have already arrived for us in England. Thank you to everyone who sent them. We look forward to reading them in January. Judy’s school closes for Chinese New Year, so we are due to visit UK from January 21st to 4th February. On the way back to China we plan to spend 4 nights in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Peter has made friends with a Chinese family who run a Chinese pharmacy. He had a meal with them recently (while Judy was teaching). As in most small Chinese shops, the meal was prepared and eaten in the shop, with heating coming from an open fire burning in a metal bowl beside the table. Peter wasn’t too sure what all the dishes were and the family spoke no English but the generous hospitality needed no translation.

Peter continues to enjoy the warm indoor swimming pool. Life is tough in China!!

Comings and Goings

On Wednesday morning, Andrew was all packed and ready to fly to Bangkok. From Bangkok, he was going to spend a few days in Chiang Mai progressing the building and distribution of the water purifiers, before returning to Bangkok for his flight back to England and on to Norway. And then the news broke that 3,000 demonstrators had stormed Bangkok airport and had taken over the control tower. All flights in and out of Bangkok were grounded! Andrew’s visa for China expired on Saturday, so he had to leave by then. But how? He spent hours on the phone (including to the travel agent who hadn’t heard about the problem) and the internet. He rebooked his flight for Saturday, plus a provisional booking to Hong Kong, just in case. And then, on Thursday morning came a call to say that there was a flight to Chiang Mai that afternoon and he was on it. So off he went, still not knowing whether he would be able to get to Bangkok for his flight to London on Monday.

On Wednesday evening, we went to an American Thanksgiving meal at the International Coffee Shop. A lot of Chinese young people were also present, so we were not the only ones who had never been to a Thanksgiving meal before. We enjoyed the roast turkey even though they couldn’t find any cranberry sauce. And we were intrigued by the choc chip cookies (or were they pumpkin cakes with chocolate?) which were on our plates with the other vegetables. After the meal, we heard all about Squantas, the native American who helped the Pilgrim Fathers find food. The evening finished with singing the doxology and Edelweiss - with actions. You didn’t know Edelweiss had actions? The Chinese do!

Christine Carver, a friend from Tewkesbury, is being sponsored by the European Union to study in Beijing. And this week they have sent her to Kunming. She stayed with us Saturday night before returning to Beijing on Sunday afternoon. It was great to catch up with her news, swap stories about flooding, etc. We hope to see her in Kunming again while we are here.

At last we have discovered how to receive mail from UK - have it sent to Judy’s school. Apparently this stems from the Chinese tradition that where you belong is your place of work rather than your home. But the good news is that in the past week two items of mails for us arrived successfully from UK. As the address is a mixture of Chinese and English, I’m going to try scanning it and including it in this blog in case anyone wants to print it out and stick it to an envelope!

A Different November

November is probably the month when we really notice the difference between England and China. How strange to look out of the window on November 5th and see and hear no fireworks or bonfires. Judy tried to explain about Guy Fawkes to her students, but it sounded pretty lame to say that we all gather around a bonfire and burn an effigy of someone who committed a crime several hundred years ago. Especially as he was unsuccessful!

And no two minutes silence on November 11th or remembrance gatherings at village memorials. We were probably the only two people in Kunming wearing poppies, although we did meet a visitor from New Zealand who thought we must be observing ANZAC Day. (Is that in November??) Next week is Thanksgiving, (apparently it’s always on the fourth Thursday in November in USA, but earlier in Canada) and we are looking forward to finding out about this celebration when we share a turkey meal with our American friends.

One of the bonuses of living in Kunming is that the shops here are not all urging us to buy, buy, buy ready for Christmas. In fact there is no mention of Christmas at all, except that some of the bigger supermarkets are selling Christmas decorations. Judy has invited some of her work colleagues to supper on Christmas Day, soit will be a different sort of festival this year, and we hope to find out more about the way Christmas is celebrated in the USA, Canada, France and the Philippines.

Judy has recovered from the e.coli infection which was making her feel so bad. Part of the problem was that she was resistant to nearly every form of antibiotic, so none of the pills were helping. However, at last a successful treatment was found and now she is feeling much more like her old self. She is also getting to know her classes at school and finding better ways to explain things in English. It is noticeable that children who have made good progress during the lessons suddenly misunderstand completely when homework is set (just like England really!)


The Halloween weekend activities at Robert’s School were a great success from their point of view, with over 1,500 visitors attending taster lessons and many of them signing up to join regular classes. Judy didn’t want to dress up as a witch or a ghost, so decided that the blue bathroom curtains could be taken down and transformed into the cloak worn by the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella. She asked one of the Chinese staff to write ‘Fairy Godmother’ in Chinese on her name badge. It was only on Sunday that she discovered that he didn’t know what a fairy godmother was, so he had written ‘Old Witch’ instead! Judy was not best pleased!

Today we joined a number of Judy’s work colleagues to celebrate PJ’s birthday. We went to a picturesque town on the outskirts of Kunming (9p on the local bus) explored the town and had lunch together in a local restaurant. The weather changed from cool and cloudy to glorious sunshine and it was lovely to get to know some of Judy’s Chinese colleagues better. We managed to carry a birthday cake around with us and then produced it at lunch, complete with a mechanical lotus flower candle which played ‘Happy Birthday’ in a rather sad minor key!

Beekeeping Conference

Peter has been in Hangzhou for 5 days attending the Ninth Asian Apicultural Association Conference. Why? He is trying to learn more about Asian Cerana bees and the best way to keep them here in Yunnan.

Peter was the only UK representative, apart from Nicola Bradbear from Bees for Development who was one of the speakers and attended part-time. There were over 1,000 delegates, 700 of whom were Chinese. Peter made friends with Rashid, the Royal Beekeeper to the Sultan of Muscat and Oman - actually he’s head of the relevant government department - and with the one delegate from Albania. But he had good conversations with experts in various fields of beekeeping, bee biology, etc., from many different countries.




Peter & Rashid with a Miao (?) lady






Probably the most exciting contact was with the team from Nagaland, an Indian state very similar to Yunnan but whose people speak English. They are actively developing Cerana beekeeping and largely share our aims and values. If you have read any books about the history of Nagaland, you will know what we mean. It could be that a visit to Nagaland will be necessary before too long! The capital, Kohima is not very far from Kunming as the crow flies, but we as are not crows we would need to go via Calcutta, but still quite a short journey. (The Kohima epitaph from the Commonwealth War Memorial there is often quoted on Remembrance Day.)
The foreign delegates were looked after by a team of English language students from local universities, including one girl who made it clear that she was definitely on the same wavelength as us. So we shall have friends in Hangzhou if we go there as tourists as we hope to do next summer.

The conference had its lighter moments, like when two Chinese gentlemen of similar age to Peter asked if they could have a talk with him. After about 15 minutes of rather mystifying conversation, it became clear that they had mistaken him for the European expert on Colony Collapse Disorder. Peter had to explain that the only thing he knew about CCD was that his colonies collapsed!

And there was the New Zealand expert whose government has banned the use of antibiotics to treat bee diseases. He explained other methods of treatment which are actually more effective. But he was followed by a Chinese speaker who felt that stringent EU standards for antibiotic levels in imported honey were unfair and were really intended to keep out Chinese imports! The closest things got to a political disagreement.


There were visits to a honey production factory and to apiaries with plenty of flying bees, but no-one got stung. The journey back to the hotel took about an hour in a fleet of 11 or 12 buses led by two police cars with flashing blue and red lights and an unmarked government car. There were policemen at every intersection stopping the traffic to allow the important visitors (!) to speed through unhindered. Peter said it felt like when we were stopped by a policeman near Windsor Castle and Mr Gorbachev went past right in front of us. The journey was made more interesting by the group from Bangalore who each insisted on singing a solo over the bus tannoy.





Gentle Cerana bees with Bangalore beekeeper






Apart from the apiary visit when the sun came out, it rained solidly in Hangzhou and Kunming all the time Peter was away. A very worthwhile conference but he is very glad to back in Kunming in spite of more torrential rain.

We are now in a period of warm sunny days, although with clear skies the temperature drops rapidly after sunset. A lovely time to be in Kunming. The water in the swimming pool is now really cold but Peter has found a Olympic size indoor pool heated to over 30 degrees Celsius. Luxury at £2 a visit!