The Campus (德宏师范高等专科学校: Mangshi, Dehong, Yunnan)

[Music]
[Music] I'm gonna take you on a walk here around my campus until Hong Yoon and China as always I'm kind of surrounded by flower blossoms on all side this is about 2:00 in the afternoon in in the middle of winter so the Sun is bright but it's actually not cold out here I'm not I'm not cold but it is it is so bright the Sun that I can't see anything on on the cameras display so I'm really filming blind here with the sun shining down so that's one of the most peculiar features the University Oh beautiful little butterfly going past if you got that one of those peculiar features this university several students complain to me that they were expecting a lake on the brochures when they signed up for this particular college there were illustrating a lake next to this very impressive dam you can see they know how to build waterworks around here but the long-term plan is to reroute the city's main river to flow past the university so I'm guessing at that time the area behind that dam will fill up and we'll have a lava lake of some kind so again I can't really see what I'm filming here I'm just gonna pause you should be able to see on the horizon there so I can try to zoom in but I'm really blinded by the Sun you should be able to see the outline of the golden tower we walk down the steps in the earlier videos I should both the golden tower and the silver tower are beautiful little silhouettes to my eyes here but as I say I'm uh I'm blinded by the sun's I don't know what I'm filming anyway so this is a far on the other parts of town this University campus we've got anyway this is a brand new campus it's just been built so all the trees are still young you can imagine just a few years there'll be a lot more shade provided by these trees and I assume some of these flowerbeds will fill in too there are mountains in the distance there if you're looking on the horizon I'm not really showing you the core of the campus partly because that's the busier part of the campus probably because this is the walk I'm happening to take today but back there sort of behind me you can see some big buildings that's the main library building on the left come here a little bit closer to the empty patch of ground that would be a lake so at the end of this walk I'm gonna take you on there's actually a scale model of what the finished university will look like when the construction is complete this University will have a gym which currently doesn't sort of one of the things that really packs my life a gym at the bottom of a sort of grand staircase that you're not gonna get to see I used to get my workout while I was here teaching by running up and down the stairs in between my classes so my class is normally just a 10-minute break between periods there's an airplane going to Dongs tiny airport the one Airport that serves both among Shaw and really really is the next major town down the road release right in the Burmese border anyway there is currently no GM on campus there are basketball courts and few other basic sports field facilities like that areas where the students play sports that you don't get to see on this particular walk she get to see the view of the mountains well the thing is we've got kind of bamboo forests filling in the horizon here so I'm not sure how much the view you're gonna get through the bamboo thicket but in any case I used to run out during my 10-minute break go down the staircase and go back up again sometimes doing that twice ten minutes wasn't that much time to get back to class and start lecturing but I could do that something like four times during a work day and that's add quite a lot to total amount of exercise case this is filming a couple hours later this is after I've just finished my my second as well my fourth of four class that's supposed to account I'm in the midway point in these steps we got a whole lot of students coming up the stairs in the distance there I can see the mountains at the farmer's field see the sports fields I guess these guys are coming up the steps after just having played I don't know basketball I'm almost at the bottom of the stairs here looking up the great staircase this will be the main entrance the University when they finished building s there's the view of the soccer pitch and then here's the Inc incomplete and it's the University the gym is going to be built in what's currently a farmer's field on the left you can see some of the construction come here already but actually this time of day if you if you look at the mountains in the background I can see a man I know how well the camera picks up any of this stuff but I can really see the layers and layers of mountains go out the background much more clearly now so the Sun is setting now this is after no this is after 5:00 p.m. not yet 6:00 p.m. but 5:30 and so you can see mountains upon mountains go out in the background here is a great propaganda message a big red banner coming across the street the propaganda messages do change every few weeks I'd say sofa heads they're peeking through peeking through the forest that's not looking towards downtown mancha downtown Moshe is sort of in the same direction as the golden tower the Buddhist temple you may or may not have seen in Verizon there before with a city like this in general it's difficult to imagine how much it'll change if you were to come back just five years from now this is really the last hour of dil Hong's obscurity to hung as province and of mouches obscurity as a city they're building a train line right now that will run all the way from China to India all the way from Beijing to Kunming then from Kunming west to end through Myanmar so that's gonna connect us to of course immediately Myanmar Bangladesh and then keep going west to India so that's the grand staircase I don't forget a sense of just how big it is here but I used to run up down these stairs to get my exercise while teaching class and you can see it's under construction so when that's completed there's currently a sports field there's a soccer field in there you can't see but when that's complete there's gonna be a gym on the Left there's gonna be a decorative pond and the river will run under that bridge there's the river it's just a trickle at the moment you can see they got big plans to this bridge I hope that all this farmland won't be destroyed it looks gorgeous right now with the mountains receding into the distance not much water in the river this time of year I really don't know if that's gonna change or not on the scale model as you saw they seem to be expecting they seem to be expecting great things from this river for it to fill up a couple of different decorative ponds I don't know and here you get a hint at the other Dehon what surrounds us just outside of Mancha the cropland stretching under the distance and of course the beautiful mountains and there you can see those white houses that's really like a suburban housing detachment over there I can clearly see a dragon fruit reminder that we are in the tropics today's a cool day as the Sun is setting I can see dragon fruit and I can see papaya trees not too many just stand above five papaya trees and then all kinds of other crops that I certainly can't identify this distance some plasticulture stand of trees over there that's it and then if it's not completely blinding you the Sun looking back to the campus heard me beyond the gate the grand stairway leading me back to my place to employ there we go we got a couple of guys walking on the steps just to give us a sense of human scale and I think the Sun is not shining too directly in her eyes this is my last day on the job my last day on campus and as far as I know I will never return to do home it's very likely I will never return to China so farewell to a chapter in my life including the chapter and which I used to run up and down these stairs so anyway sorry I was just commenting that this is really the last the last hour of dil Hong and Mancha being an obscure place because once that train line is built it will be connected to the outside world in a way that it never has been before currently to get here by bus is fully 12 hours I could say 12 hours plus you know more than 12 hours so you know if you get on yeah if you get on the bus at 6 a.m. you are lucky to get here by 6 p.m. I would say 14 hours is a more reasonable 14 hours or 16 hours is a workable estimate but it's a beautiful bus ride it goes through the mountains you want to get on it early in the morning so you get the view now going at night but so still today in 2017 that's the bus ride from Kunming de Mancha so it really is a remote place even if it doesn't look at that remote when you just look at the distances in the map you have to keep in mind how how high the mountains are what's kept us isolated here you know historically and even still presently anyway yeah I was commenting before as we passed this propaganda poster going the other way that we do get new propaganda every few weeks for me most memorably there was a period of time when all the propaganda was trying to get you to join the army trying to get you to join the Chinese army and you know I could I could understand pretty plainly worded I can understand the propaganda message on most of those posters and some of them I sat down you know with my dictionary and I took a moment to take a moment to unravel what they were getting at but it's very difficult for me to imagine any of the students here joining the Chinese army partly to the gender-balanced this used to be a Teachers College so we're you know the majority of students weren't training to these school teachers which is a majority female profession so you had most female students my own students the vast majority of them are female really have three or four male students in all my classes combined and hundreds of females so when I say it's not like it's a 60/40 split and the women of course are not going to be inclined to join the army especially not if they're qualified smooth yeah well joy give shape in huh that's one of the residue nozbe attraction it's not that common here not that many professors know me and say hi to me on campus is the ones who speak English or especially quietly show me a joy uh oh she is one of the she teaches I think both English and Burmese I think she teaches English because we do we are foreign languages Department here isn't just European languages like English and French we also teach adjacent Southeast Asian languages like Burmese Thai Cambodian and we teach the local indigenous languages gene pool gene pool which is also known as catch in and the Hong guy so anyway um that's slightly derailed my train of thought anyway I was just commenting that you know socioeconomically and in terms of gender bells so here's a here's a stand of here's a stand of bamboo going in the view over there you should be able to see the sports field is that really filming blind as long as tube right here there is a soccer field that you can see over there and then this way peeking through the trees in the bamboo you get a view of the beautiful sometimes they're verdant green and sometimes like now they're a bit more yellow from from the Sun drying out the stubble in the fields anyway I remember that there was a big campaign for a couple of months where they had all this new property it's on campus trying to encourage students to sign up and join the the Chinese army and you know it was the whole variety of messages messages about bravery messages about seeing the world message about make your parents proud and you know I remember right after that we had a campaign about not dropping out of school but I wondered I wondered of what they were hoping in recruiting was to recruit the students who were thinking about dropping out or or actually dropping out I do especially like this shaded parking lot but don't know if everything to show you yeah I think I think there's no view if I take you take you to the edge of this parking lot you're just gonna see well you can see the mountains in the distance all right that's worth filming that's we're filling before I go inside and show you the scale model of what the University of Holby this is a university where the vast majority of students live in residence and this is the thing I was gonna say whether it's under the heading of you know the army recruitment or any other topic here there can we see the mountains in the distance there you go maybe somehow it's better to film here or film in the sunlight just look at the horizon carefully you can see row after row of mountains going off today a little bit hazy very bright but a little bit hazy depending on the clarity how much the mountains you can see will vary from day by day but my students do not by any means come just from this local province of this local area they come from all over China and so if you think about it a student who's chosen to come and live here to become a schoolteacher to pursue another profession so I should say this this Pro this University used to be a normal University aka a teacher training University but it's been upgraded now to be a full University from any other subjects as well it's it's not just a Teachers College it's general university but if you come here from across China to have this experience and have this education and leave as a qualified schoolteacher those students that then will be the least likely to consider signing up to go to the Burmese border to defend the country against the civil war that is indeed ongoing right next door we're in tremendous peace and security here these trees are not to tropical wonder if that was an intentional choice not to have palm trees here oh here we go here are a few palms but a lot of these are more temperate trees me because we're up on the top of a hill and they were concerned about getting a bit cold in the winter you know yeah would you uh do leadership Ian just making a short film to show this model so one of my colleagues here another professor has just walked up this is new you should send them up I think this is a new model so I didn't know this so shy well I mean even when you only good gentian fungi so you should even the Jensen bug that just seems like email so right now I work out at home but if I come back in a few years they'll be a gym and this also I show them so you there's gonna be a river going a river and a lake there and then also a lake in about well back here back here some of my students complain to me they said when they decide was yeah they said when they decided to come to this university they expected there to be a there to be a lake and there's no you can still see the fish you you see the fish did you see sit minute so we had a lot of rain a few months ago I mean this is now winter but I guess at right after it rained it was full of water for a little piece honestly no I don't see the families and this right part you see the the just nice small shadow oh I dunno so the fish are the fish are struggling to survive in our in our little pond as the pond gets smaller and smaller the two weeks ago that's really not of water yeah well remember we had we had a lot of rain for a few months but now there's no rain at all no anyway a few of my students did complain they wanted they wanted there to be a big lake so in the future I think they'll move the river and then they will do more they'll be more water anyway there you go and you get a sense of the huge scale of the student housing because we have students who come here from all over China yes those buildings down there the buildings on the buildings on the top of the hill are all finished but in some of these over here I think this is not finished here we have the basketball courts and as the Sun is setting behind me blocking the view downtown there is really the center of the campus so I don't know what the constant was having a dead tree at the center of the campus you can see up the top of the hill that's the canteen where the students may or may not choose deep at lunch beautifully manicured roads leading off in all directions tell the other parts of the campus and those build big buildings in the background beyond our sort of central park here this little garden park area all those big buildings in a row our student housing and if i zoom in you can see that pretty clearly because they've all got their laundry hanging out on the on the porch and those students in many ways their lives here in mancha are beautiful sure it's a contrast whatever cold and polluted part of China they come from that here it's warm and tropical surrounded by tropical trees and tropical fruit and not polluted not overpopulated however they are sleeping with six students to a room in bunk beds three students per bed so in some ways as a university student in your in Bangka life is hard [Music] all right there you go as the Sun sets the end of my long long work day you can see the Golden Temple seemingly glowing and gold in fact it's illuminated on the top of that distant Hill the Sun sets over the basketball courts I see my final final farewell to uh the home feature college bonus yen