Survived my largely unplanned Yunnan travel week and I have never been so sore and sunburnt. Regardless, it was an amazing week and just the “break” I needed to keep motivated in studies. As of yesterday the two week Kunming urban homestay section of SIT study abroad started and I’m happy to say I finally have a decent wifi connection at my new temporary home. But on a serious note, I’m living with a small family with a six year old son who calls me “\u7f8e\u56fd\u59d0\u59d0” which means American older sister. My heart melts everytime I hear him call me that. This homestay is a perfect practical test for all the Chinese classes I have been taking and so far I’d give myself a solid C. Luckily my host family is extremely patient and kind, and my host mom knows basic English so if there’s anything I am not clear on we can usually figure it out. This homestay is a bit out of the way of my classes, approximately a forty five minute drive, but my host dad will be dropping me and my host mom off near the university every morning.<\/p>\n
The last month of SIT Kunming we are given the choice of an internship, individual research project, or intensive language course. After coming back from my Yunnan Exploration week I’ve decided to go with the intensive language course because although I have many ideas for conducting research they are all too controversial to carry out or involve intensive interviews. For obvious reasons I can’t research anything too controversial in China and as for the latter I am not confident enough in my language skills to do the interviews justice. Nonetheless I am excited for the intensive language course. I will be staying in Kunming but will have the afternoons free and I am talking with my advisor about volunteer opportunities or clubs I can join during my free time.<\/p>\n
As a final note, I made a video of my time hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge (\u864e\u8df3\u5ce1) and tried attaching it to this post, but unfortunately it wouldn’t load. If you want to see it, it is posted on my facebook. I ended up hiking for about three and a half days there before continuing on to Lijiang for a day and a half, though only the hiking portion is in the video. Definitely would recommend taking a couple days to go there, it is easily my favorite place in China so far and I met some amazing people (and animals).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Survived my largely unplanned Yunnan travel week and I have never been so sore and sunburnt. Regardless, it was an amazing week and just the “break” I needed to keep motivated in studies. As of yesterday the two week Kunming urban homestay section of SIT study abroad started and I’m happy to say I finally…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":285,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/285"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14615,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9426\/revisions\/14615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}