I’m Madeleine, a Pomona junior spending the fall semester abroad in Kunming, China. Here’s a little taste of my average weekday:
7:00– If I wake up this early, I like to go down to Cuihu Lake where exclusively old people practice Tai Chi, their Chinese opera skills, embroidery, dancing, etc. I am a Chinese grandma at heart, so I feel especially at home here.
7:45– Wake up. Judge whether I have time for a shower. Buy new favorite delicious Chinese breakfast food (er kuai) from a street vendor on the way to class. Try to review how to write some characters before our daily quizzes.
8:30– Classes start. My classes are all in Chinese and tiny, with no more than 6 people in any one class. My three morning classes are called “Kunming Impressions,” “China’s Environment and Development,” and “Yunnan’s Ethnic Minorities.”
12:00– Classes finish. I either go to the Yunnan University cafeteria for lunch or buy something from a nearby restaurant or street vendor.
1:00– My afternoons are mostly free. I go running around the lake with friends, sit in a cafe and do class readings, take the bus to the swimming pool, or go to the park to conduct interview assignments with adorable old Chinese ladies who love to talk, but whose heavily-accented Chinese I can barely understand. Soon I’m going to start learning calligraphy and hopefully kung fu too!
3:00– On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have my one-on-one tutorial on feminism in China. My instructor, a grad student at a nearby university, and I discuss the readings and I ask way too many questions. My instructor doesn’t quite understand why I have to grapple with all of the societal problems we touch on (in my poorly-articulated Chinese no less), but is kind enough to thoughtfully answer my questions and our conversations are always very interesting. We usually end class late.
6:00– Grab dinner with friends. The area I live in is full of little restaurants and vendors, so it’s never hard to find somewhere to eat. Some favorites are the sidewalk soup noodle shop and the little Xinjiang Muslim restaurant tucked away in an alley. Dinner usually comes to between $2-3 USD per person.
7:00– Homework. I usually spend some time in our activity room, which has WiFi, comfy chairs, and more often than not, Chinese-dubbed Harry Potter playing on the TV. Sometimes I’ll go for a late-night milk tea run with my Chinese roommate.
11:30– Fall asleep to the sounds of the still-bustling alley four stories below.