Trip.
I’m in Jinghong now, in the Xishuangbanna area of Yunnan province.¬† My trip so far has been a mixed bag of frustration and fun.¬† The girl I’m going with seems like she’s not all there, and forgets or loses practically everything (including one plane ticket so far).¬† She also has this knee injury that I didn’t know about before which has prevented us from doing a lot of the stuff we wanted to do.¬† In fact, when I met her, I thought she was okay, but then later she seemed to get weirder and weirder.¬† I was really expecting problems on this trip, but there was nothing I could do because I had already bought the tickets and they were nonrefundable.
On the plus side, we did visit a Dai minority village and a Aini minority village.¬† Today I went to a park and ended up meeting a group of elderly minority women.¬† I’m not sure which group they were from — maybe Hani?¬† — I couldn’t tell because their Chinese was not very standard.¬† Anyway, they were really talkative and outgoing.¬† They agreed to have their photos taken, and then critiqued the photos pretty critically.¬† They seemed to be familiar with the ins and outs of digital cameras.¬† They were all wearing traditional clothing, with headscarves, silver pins in their hair, and the most unusual thing was that they weren’t wearing any shoes.¬† The girl from their village who was at the park with them told another woman (who I think was Aini, and asked her about her bare feet), why they didn’t wear shoes.¬† She said it was just one of their customs.¬† The girl, who might have been in her early twenties, was wearing modern clothes, but her feet were bare too.¬†