Returning to Jietou and Being Surrounded by Yellow

First of all, my bag arrived! And it even arrived when they said it would. (Although as a side note: I thought a flight number referred to both a given route and time...but the same flight number on Wednesday departed, as scheduled, three hours later than the same flight on Monday.) This meant that I was able to leave Kunming on Wednesday night and get into Baoshan the next morning.

As nice as Kunming is, it's also a huge city. Having never been before, and not having planned to stay there, I found it rather overwhelming, so it was nice to get back to familiar territory. I even made conversation with both of my taxi drivers. The first asked me if I had a boyfriend and then offered to give me her nephew's phone number. The second very sweetly thanked me for teaching the rural children.

I especially enjoyed the bus ride back to Jietou from Tengchong. I knew the route well, but the landscape had changed. I left in the dead of winter. Now it is spring. For one thing, I lost count of how many young calves I saw, including "normal cattle" (Bos taurus) and water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), both of which are much cuter as calves than as adults. The most obvious difference, though, was in the fields. All of the fields--which had been growing rice, corn, and other crops when I arrived last fall and had since been harvested--were blanketed in yellow flowers.

I didn't know what they were until I looked them up, although they looked a bit like the sprouted cabbage shoots that we eat here, but with more flowers. These gorgeous flowers are called rapeseed, Brassica napus, otherwise known as canola, although technically canola only refers to one subspecies (others include Siberian kale and rutabaga) and I have no idea which subspecies this is. Apparently the name canola was created from Canada and ola (oil low acid). And it is a brassica species, therefore related to cabbage, broccoli, etc., so I may have been right about it being what we eat*. Also, I never cease to be amazed by brassicas: not only do they provide a huge variety of foods, it used for cooking oil and biofuel!


The fields of rapeseed are absolutely spectacular. Interestingly, they also have the visual effect of drawing one's eyes to the breaks in the patchy and terraced fields. Usually there are multiple different crops, but they're all green, and blur together a bit. This monoculture of rapeseed means that these striking yellow flowers go on for miles, but are broken up into small--sometimes even tiny--units, which are much more noticeable since the plants are all the same.

It's not just the large stretches of fields that look like this. Even fields that one might have never seen or noticed, suddenly light up in the landscape. Every direction that I look out of the windows of my apartment, even though I'm in town, I can see at least a small blur of yellow in the distance. You've seen this view multiple times before (from my balcony looking past the school building at the mountains), but doesn't it look drastically altered with all that rapeseed?

*I have since confirmed with the locals that the greens that they serve are, in fact, the same plant as the flowers! It's called yóucài (油菜), which means oil vegetable.