I couldn't describe Kunming as beautiful. I couldn't describe China as a whole as beautiful; it's more awe-inspiring. It's a parallel universe. There have been moments in the trip so far where the horizon was filled with nothing but mountains, jungle, and Buddhist temples, and there are certainly parks in Kunming that make my jaw drop open. But for the most part, it's a gritty, poor city, where almost nothing is sleek and the air reeks of car exhaust. My dorm is off a dirt alleyway filled with street vendors, a short walk from the rocky train tracks that bustle with people regardless of whether a train is coming or not. My hallway has the other twelve kids on my program plus some Chinese students at Yunnan Nationalities University, the school in the city that caters to minority groups and the university at which the program is based. My roommate, in a twist, is named Courtney Morse; she is also a vegetarian.

today Courtney, Justin and were sent on our "drop off." We were given a sheet of paper with chinese characters and told we had six hours in which to find it. Ours read "da guan lou," so we set out from the university, past Green Lake Park with its inflatable cars for rent in the shape of animals, past all the stores that sold shoes and tea accessories and mensware, looking for some sort of building that might possess any kind of view. What we ended up at a "Western Playground," which turned out to be a theme park hidden in the forest next to a polluted lake with some of the scariest rides I have ever seen. There was also a sort of mini-Olympics in which Chinese people gathered in hordes to watch their compatriots complete the monkey bars and raft across an expansive inflatable pool.

everywhere I go I am used to Latin America, where the men catcall and small children come up to sell you baskets of gum. Chinese people for the most part seem oblivious to the fact that there are any foreigners among them; it is as if they have deemed their enormously favorable balance of trade more than enough to compensate for their lack of desire to hawk small dolls on the street. I've never been anywhere so cheap in my life, I'm not sure I've even spent $13 dollars in the week I've been here. The flavors are exotic and tolerable up to a certain point, I've eaten hundred-year-old eggs, lukewarm soy milk, and all sorts of roots and fungus, which were good enough. I hid behind my vegetarianism when duck head and eel and insects were brought out. I crave bread and cheese, and already feel nauseous at the thought of eating another bowl of squishy noodles.

the lights in my hallway switch on with a clap, or really whenever someone opens a door or says something a little too loud. The toilets can only be described as holes in the ground--I may now know how the asian squat came into existence. Small dogs everywhere are well-groomed. No one, no one, no one speaks English. My pants will soon expand beyond recognition without a dryer to shrink them down.