After being expelled from my now ex-girlfriend's villa, Rudy and myself had to leave the green surroundings of the southern suburbs of Kunming and move into the city proper.
This is the account of trying to train while living in the middle of a city in China.
We rented our new apartment from a Frenchman, who was subletting it for a friend, the original tenant, also a Frenchman. The original Frenchman came to Kunming to study Chinese medicine, paid a year’s rent, promptly got sick and had to go back to France. The flat came with posters of naked Chinese dudes showing acupuncture points and meridians, an excellent German washing machine, a huge Chinese-made plasma screen TV, a wooden Buddha and a very skinny bespectacled French-speaking Chinese girl called Li Mei.
Li Mei was supposed to move out as soon as we moved in, but we decided to keep her. Her major was French and she had just spent a year in France teaching Chinese in a secondary school in a rough part of Paris as part of Chinese government program. Now she was working as a translator for Kunming’s French population. The original tenant gave her a room free of charge in return for her help translating, paying the bills and generally dealing with China. Li Mei was poor, shy, lived in the smallest room with very few possessions, weighed 43 kilos and I immediately called her The House Elf. The Elf was delighted to keep her Elf Hole and live with Chinese speaking foreigners who seemed normal and did not care much for kungfu, taichi or acupuncture points of the spleen meridian.
Our residential area, Xiao Qu in Chinese, was right next to a bus terminal and so was called Ba Shi Jia Yuan, which can be liberally translated as Bus Home. The neighboring attractions were The Nationalities University with thousands of staring students, a degraded, rubbish strewn mountain which we unsuccessfully tried to turn into a hill-training area, but had to retreat in disgust. The mountain then got christened The Shit Canyon for obvious reasons. The residential area of the Nationalities University had a tiny, 300m dirt athletics track where local elderly residents did their walking in the evening, sometimes with dogs and often backwards. Since our training mountain (not the Shit Canyon) got closed to visitors because of the risk of forest fires, Rudy made the Tiny Track his main training base, doing up to 15 miles worth of tiny circles per session, coming back home lobotomized.
I preferred to run 2 miles down a crowded road weaving between scooters, buses, street vendors and trucks to a bigger track, on the campus of the engineering university. The track is standard size and the surface is black dirt, which all of my socks and training shoes became permanently permeated with. Whenever a football game was not on, the grass was dotted with giggling couples. The guys were clumsily, but with limpet-like determination, latching on to the girls, who with equal determination would fight off the guys’ attempts to kiss them. On the weekends the old timers, who look like they have been around since the early Tang dynasty at least, would come to the track to fly kites. They would set up their stools on the edge of the running lanes, light up their cigarettes and let the kites loose. The kites were enormous and are manipulated by reels of fishing line. The overall impression is that the old men are fishing for UFOs.
The track came with two main obstacles, both of chemical nature. The primary one was an open garbage deposit from the university canteen at one end, which covered a quarter of the track in a foul cloud of rotting food waste. The second obstacle was not a permanent feature. The grounds keeper (also of the early Tang dynasty) collected garbage liberally thrown on the track by students, arranged it into manageable heaps on the track and lit them on fire. On a bad day, the combination of UFO fishermen’s cigarette smoke, garbage deposit’s rotten stench and the acrid smoke from burning plastic gave the interval workout a strange post-apocalyptic feel.
This is the account of trying to train while living in the middle of a city in China.
We rented our new apartment from a Frenchman, who was subletting it for a friend, the original tenant, also a Frenchman. The original Frenchman came to Kunming to study Chinese medicine, paid a year’s rent, promptly got sick and had to go back to France. The flat came with posters of naked Chinese dudes showing acupuncture points and meridians, an excellent German washing machine, a huge Chinese-made plasma screen TV, a wooden Buddha and a very skinny bespectacled French-speaking Chinese girl called Li Mei.
Li Mei was supposed to move out as soon as we moved in, but we decided to keep her. Her major was French and she had just spent a year in France teaching Chinese in a secondary school in a rough part of Paris as part of Chinese government program. Now she was working as a translator for Kunming’s French population. The original tenant gave her a room free of charge in return for her help translating, paying the bills and generally dealing with China. Li Mei was poor, shy, lived in the smallest room with very few possessions, weighed 43 kilos and I immediately called her The House Elf. The Elf was delighted to keep her Elf Hole and live with Chinese speaking foreigners who seemed normal and did not care much for kungfu, taichi or acupuncture points of the spleen meridian.
Our residential area, Xiao Qu in Chinese, was right next to a bus terminal and so was called Ba Shi Jia Yuan, which can be liberally translated as Bus Home. The neighboring attractions were The Nationalities University with thousands of staring students, a degraded, rubbish strewn mountain which we unsuccessfully tried to turn into a hill-training area, but had to retreat in disgust. The mountain then got christened The Shit Canyon for obvious reasons. The residential area of the Nationalities University had a tiny, 300m dirt athletics track where local elderly residents did their walking in the evening, sometimes with dogs and often backwards. Since our training mountain (not the Shit Canyon) got closed to visitors because of the risk of forest fires, Rudy made the Tiny Track his main training base, doing up to 15 miles worth of tiny circles per session, coming back home lobotomized.
I preferred to run 2 miles down a crowded road weaving between scooters, buses, street vendors and trucks to a bigger track, on the campus of the engineering university. The track is standard size and the surface is black dirt, which all of my socks and training shoes became permanently permeated with. Whenever a football game was not on, the grass was dotted with giggling couples. The guys were clumsily, but with limpet-like determination, latching on to the girls, who with equal determination would fight off the guys’ attempts to kiss them. On the weekends the old timers, who look like they have been around since the early Tang dynasty at least, would come to the track to fly kites. They would set up their stools on the edge of the running lanes, light up their cigarettes and let the kites loose. The kites were enormous and are manipulated by reels of fishing line. The overall impression is that the old men are fishing for UFOs.
The track came with two main obstacles, both of chemical nature. The primary one was an open garbage deposit from the university canteen at one end, which covered a quarter of the track in a foul cloud of rotting food waste. The second obstacle was not a permanent feature. The grounds keeper (also of the early Tang dynasty) collected garbage liberally thrown on the track by students, arranged it into manageable heaps on the track and lit them on fire. On a bad day, the combination of UFO fishermen’s cigarette smoke, garbage deposit’s rotten stench and the acrid smoke from burning plastic gave the interval workout a strange post-apocalyptic feel.