Progress

I have been having some trouble posting blogs so have been emailing some to my mum and getting her to post them for me. As I seem to be able to do it myself this time, a couple of these may be out of order.

Well, we had quite a busy day today. Last night the guy who runs the Husi Teahouse (Makers of the most fantastic coffee I have ever tasted, percolated Yunnan local coffee done to perfection) mentioned to me that at the Yongning High School there might be a Mosuo English teacher. As this would help me immensely (my Chinese being what it is), we headed down there this morning- a half hour minibus ride over rocky roads, through creeks, around narrow hairpin bends and past locals breaking rocks with picks by the side of the road. We wandered through the market and the main street and eventually found the high school. Walked past several hundred staring teenagers on the sports field who were involved in jogging and some kind of rock hurling sport. I eventually found the office and the Husi Teahouse guy was there! We both started laughing- I'm still not sure why he was there, although he had his kids with him so it was probably routine. Anyway he introduced me to a few of the teachers who were very interested to meet me and hear about what I was doing. Anyway, it turned out the English teacher is actually Tibetan but is apparently married to a Mosuo man and speaks some Mosuo, however she won't be there until next week. Anyway, the other teachers, one of whom is Mosuo, told me that about half the students at the school are Mosuo, and there are also Tibetan, Yi, Han students, etc.

They were quite keen for me to come into the school and help the students with there English and for them to teach me Mosuo, when school goes back in February. The Mosuo man is also going to arrange for me to stay with a Mosuo family. This arrangement suits me fine because I can't really afford to pay people much to work with me. They have also offered to help me with anything I need, eg. buying things at local prices.

As we left the school we walked past a class where an English lesson was going on. Scott called out "hello" to the kids and they broke out into the biggest grins and called "hello" back.

First however, we are going back to Lijiang tomorrow as that is the location of the nearest bank of China (six hours away). We had imagined we would be able to change travellers cheques up here, but not so. Also, things are a bit expensive in Luoshui, as it is a big tourist attraction. We spent a bit of money the day before we left Lijiang (Scott bought a painting and we went to a Naxi orchestra) so we had significantly less money than we had intended. So the last few days we tried rationing ourselves to $18 a day (including the $9. for our motel room- with bathroom and hot water). Yes it sounds ridiculous when you change it into Australian dollars, but 100 yuan a day is enough if you just want somewhere to sleep and to eat, etc. The cab fares to go to various villages and the 12 yuan coffees were killing our budget, so we are going back to Lijiang for the weekend. I have a few names of people to contact there so it should be usefull anyway. Then we will come back probably Tuesday and relocate to Yongning to do a week at the school, before it closes for the holidays.

After the school visit, we walked to a local buddhist monastery. The lamas were sitting on the grass eating lunch and invited us to join them. During the middle of the day here, it is actually really quite warm and sunny, so it was very pleasant sitting on the grass eating rice and vegetables with the lamas. One of them showed us around the lamasery too, which was quite spectacular. In the evening and early morning it is quite bitterly cold. There is snow on the mountain peaks but not in the village. Apparently the winter here is quite dry and can get to -10 degrees.

Well that's all for now, Laura