10-Day Yunnan Youth Homestay Exchange: Kunming & a Mountain Village

Afternoon — Arrival in Kunming
Arrive at Kunming Changshui Airport (preferably on an afternoon flight for easier transfer) and check into a hotel near Cuihu Lake, a central, walkable spot convenient for daily travel. Take time to rest and enjoy the city's mild 'Spring City' air.

Dinner — Kunming Cuisine
Indulge in Qian Zhang Rou (Kunming-style roasted pork) and Guo Qiao Mi Xian (Crossing-the-Bridge rice noodles), iconic dishes that blend Yunnan's ethnic flavors.

Evening — at your leisure
The evening is yours to relax at your hotel.

Morning — orientation
Kunming sits at 1,891 metres on a plateau in the north of Yunnan, which is why it is called the Spring City: the sun is strong, the air is dry in winter, and the temperature barely moves out of the teens for much of the year. The first session puts the province in context. Yunnan borders three countries and is home to twenty-five of China's officially recognised minority nationalities, each with its own language, dress, festivals and cuisine; the province grows tea, tobacco, coffee, flowers and much of the country's rubber, and its population is spread between a handful of cities and a very large number of mountain villages. Participants then go through the programme's own rules in detail, with a printed copy each, before they meet any host family.

Late morning — matching and preparing to stay
Host families in Kunming and in the village are arranged through a local partner and are screened, briefed and bound by a written code of conduct; families and participants are matched on the basis of a short profile completed before travel - age, gender, allergies, medical needs, dietary requirements, pets, smoking, and any preference about sharing a room. Participants prepare the information their family actually needs: how to say what they cannot eat, how to explain a medicine, how to ask for help, and how to say thank you. A member of programme staff speaks with every participant individually before the first night, and no placement is final until both sides have spoken to each other.

Lunch
A first Yunnan meal, which is not one cuisine: rice noodles in broth, grilled fish with herbs, pickles, and a plate of greens that will not be recognised at home.

Afternoon — the rules that matter
The afternoon briefing is the part of the programme that is not negotiable, and it covers the following in plain terms. Written parental consent is required for every participant under 18 before any homestay. Two adults must be present in the household whenever participants are there, and nobody is ever alone with one adult. Participants do not leave the house or village without an accompanying adult from the family or the programme, do not accept lifts from anyone outside the programme, do not exchange private phone numbers or social media accounts with anyone met locally, and do not give or receive money. Addresses, family names and never the location of minors are not posted online, and no photograph of any household member or local child is taken or shared without explicit consent. Each participant carries a card with the coordinator's number, the accommodation address and the local emergency numbers, and the coordinator is on duty twenty-four hours a day for the length of the stay.

Evening — first night with the family
Participants move to their host families for the first night in the city, with a check-in call from the programme the same evening and a short group meeting the following morning. Any placement that is not working is changed, without discussion of fault, and there is no expectation that anyone should put up with a situation they are uneasy about.

Cultural Insight — staying in a household rather than visiting one
The difference between a homestay and hospitality is that the guest has to fit in rather than be served. In a Kunming household that means the rhythm of the day is not arranged around the visitor: someone leaves for work before seven, the grandparents may be the ones at home during the day, the television is on in the evening, and the meals are what the family eats. Participants who do best have learned a few phrases before they arrive, bring photographs of their own family, and offer to help in the kitchen rather than waiting to be entertained.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
With a host family in Kunming.

Morning — Green Lake Park
Begin at Green Lake Park (Cuihu), Kunming's urban oasis of willow-lined water where locals dance, play instruments, and feed black-headed gulls in winter. Its teahouses and summer lotus blooms offer a gentle introduction to the city's laid-back charm.

Afternoon — Yunnan Ethnic Village
Explore this cultural park showcasing 25 of Yunnan's ethnic groups, including the Dai, Bai, and Naxi. Watch traditional dances, tour replica villages, and experience rituals like the Dai water-splashing festival that highlight the province's diversity.

Evening — Crossing Bridge Rice Noodles
Dive into Kunming's signature dish, Guoqiao Mixian, at a local spot such as Shangri-La Cafe. Assemble raw ingredients—meat, vegetables, herbs—into a piping-hot broth, and pair it with Yunnan Pu'er tea for an authentic ritual.

Morning — the work the season requires
The village is a farming village in the hills south of Kunming, reached by road in roughly three hours; households grow maize, potatoes and vegetables, keep pigs and chickens, and depend on a mix of farming, wage work in the towns and remittances from family members working further away. What participants do in the morning depends entirely on the season and the day - carrying and spreading compost, weeding a vegetable plot, moving maize cobs to dry on a rack, collecting fodder, helping to repair a fence or a water channel - and the household decides what is safe and suitable, not the group. The rules are the ordinary ones on a working smallholding: ask before handling any tool or animal, wear boots and long sleeves, keep out of the way of machinery and of any dog that is doing its job, do not drink untreated water, and stay within sight of an adult from the family or the programme at all times.

Late morning — the fields and terraces
Mid-morning, the household or a neighbouring farmer walks the group through the land they farm. Around the village the slopes are terraced, some of them worked continuously for centuries, with stone or earth retaining walls, small channels that move water from one plot to the next, and paths that are also the boundaries. The walk is also where the arithmetic of the place becomes visible: how far a household has to carry everything, how much land a family actually holds, why a single hailstorm or a late frost can decide a year, and why so many villages now depend on income earned elsewhere. Participants record what they see in a notebook or with a camera only with the agreement of the people in the frame.

Lunch
At the household: rice, a stir-fried vegetable, pickles, and eggs or a small amount of cured pork - what the family eats, from what it grows, in the quantities it eats.

Afternoon — the village and its water
The afternoon is unstructured on purpose. Participants help with whatever the household is doing, play with the children in the lane, sit with an older resident who wants to practise a few words of English, or walk to the water source with the person whose job it is to check it. Village life runs on shared infrastructure that outsiders rarely notice: the tank and pipe that supply drinking water, the concrete lane paid for by a village fund, the single shop, the village committee's notice board, the loudspeaker that makes announcements, and the bus that leaves for the market town twice a day. Most of what participants say afterwards is about the evening instead.

Evening — at the table
The household meal is the centre of the day, taken early and unhurried, with dishes put in the middle of the table and the visitor served first whether they want to be or not. In many homes the grandparents are present and the conversation is in a local dialect rather than standard Mandarin, with the school-age children interpreting for both sides. Participants are expected to help clear the table, and to keep to the family's usual bedtime, because the family gets up early and so does the household they are living in.

Cultural Insight — what a homestay can and cannot do
Three nights in a household does not make anyone an insider, and treating it as a cultural experience to be consumed is the fastest way to make it an uncomfortable one. What it does do is replace a description of rural Yunnan with particular facts: the time a meal takes to cook, the amount of physical work a household does before ten in the morning, the fact that mobile signal is good in one corner of the yard and absent in the rest, and the specific person - usually an eleven-year-old - who ends up holding the conversation together.

Safeguarding and consent
Written parental consent is held for every participant under 18. Two adults from the household are present whenever participants are in the house, participants are never alone with one adult, do not leave the village without an accompanying adult, accept no lifts outside the programme, give and receive no money, and exchange no private contact details. No photograph of a household member or a local child is taken or shared without explicit consent, and no address or full name of any household or minor is published anywhere.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
With a host household or in the village guesthouse, selected according to the family's capacity.

Morning — games, not lessons
The village school is a partner arranged through a local institution, and its staff decide what is useful; many small rural schools have been consolidated into larger boarding schools in recent years, and the children who remain in the village may be on holiday or at a school some distance away, so what is possible changes from week to week. The programme's rule is straightforward: visiting participants do not teach, do not test and do not assess. They run games, sport and conversation in English for an hour or two, in the school yard, with the school's own teachers present the whole time. Whatever materials are used are left behind with the teachers in a form they can reuse, and no promises are made about money, equipment or a return visit.

Late morning — language exchange, both ways
The useful half of the morning runs in both directions. Village children practise English greetings, numbers and questions with the visitors; the visitors learn to name the objects around them in Mandarin and to hear the local dialect that the children actually speak at home. Everyone writes a few words in the other's script. There is no curriculum and no target, and the session ends when the children lose interest, which is the correct measure of whether it was working. What is left behind is deliberately small: a set of games written on cards, a list of the words the children asked for, and a note of what they already knew, handed to the teachers so that the next group does not start from nothing.

Lunch
With the household, or at the school where the school invites the group and its own staff are eating.

Afternoon — a community task
The afternoon is spent on something the village has asked for and supervises: clearing and sweeping a shared lane or the yard in front of the village hall, planting along a path, sorting equipment at the school, or carrying and stacking firewood for an older resident. The programme does not bring in a project of its own and does not promise a duration of service - roughly one working afternoon is the honest expectation, and the point is to take part in the ordinary maintenance that a village does for itself. Participants work alongside residents, under the supervision of the person who owns the task, and stop when that person says the job is done.

Evening — the village's own event
The evening belongs to the village. Depending on the season and the community, that may be a meal cooked by several households, a dance or song practice for a festival, a basketball or volleyball match on the village court, or simply tea and a long conversation in a courtyard with whoever turns up. Participants take part if invited and stay out of the way if the occasion is not theirs; where alcohol is offered, declining is entirely acceptable and nobody is obliged to drink. Everything ends early, because the village starts early.

Cultural Insight — the economics behind the hospitality
A village that hosts visitors is doing something with an opportunity cost, and it is worth being honest about what a group of foreign teenagers means locally: some income for the households that provide rooms and meals, some prestige for the community, an English practice session that teachers value, and also a considerable amount of work and clearing up. Participants who ask what the village gets out of the visit, rather than what they got out of the village, tend to be the ones the households remember. It is also worth knowing that a community decides early whether a group is worth hosting again, and the decision usually turns on small things - whether people turned up on time, cleared their plates, took their boots off at the door and left the shared spaces as they found them.

Safeguarding and consent
Participants under 18 are supervised by their own teachers and programme staff under a two-adult rule at all times, and written parental consent is held for every one of them. No participant is alone with a local adult or child, no private contact details are exchanged, no money or personal gifts are given, and no photograph of a local child or household member is taken, stored or published without the explicit consent of a parent or guardian - which also means that much of the day will simply not be photographed.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
With a host household or in the village guesthouse.

Morning — the market
Rural markets in Yunnan still run on a rotating cycle rather than every day, so the whole town is busy on market day and quiet the next. Participants go with the household that is doing the week's shopping, by the local bus where it runs or in the programme vehicle when it does not. What is for sale is what the surrounding villages produce and cannot make themselves: vegetables and chilli by the bundle, fresh tofu, dried mushrooms, cured pork and sausage, live poultry, seed, plastic buckets and rubber boots, farm tools, cheap clothing, phone accessories, herbal medicine, and the one stall that everybody visits for a bowl of rice noodles. Prices are quoted in yuan and often negotiated by a few mao. Nothing is bought for participants by the programme, and any purchase they make is their own.

Late morning — cooking what was bought
Back in the village, lunch is cooked with the household from the morning's shopping. Yunnan cooking is regional rather than unified, and the farmhouse version is built on a few things: a wok over a wood or gas fire, chilli and fermented seasonings, herbs picked from the edge of the plot, greens cooked for two minutes, and rice or rice noodles as the base. Participants are given a job that matters - washing, chopping, tending the fire, turning the erkuai rice cakes on the griddle - rather than being allowed to stand and watch. Everything is cooked through, water is boiled or filtered, and nothing that has been off the heat for hours is eaten, which is the ordinary food-safety practice in a village kitchen rather than a special measure.

Lunch
The meal they have just cooked, with the household, and more of it than they intended to eat.

Afternoon — a craft, and what it is worth
The afternoon is spent on a craft that the household or a neighbour actually practises: stitching and mending with indigo cloth, weaving a bamboo basket or a mat, making simple embroidery, pressing and drying tea, or shaping and painting a small item of pottery where a workshop exists locally. The materials come from the household or are bought in the market, not imported by the programme. The conversation that goes with the work is the valuable part - how long it takes to make one item, what it sells for, who buys it, and whether anyone in the household's next generation intends to keep doing it.

Evening — a farewell dinner
The last night in the village is usually a shared meal, with two or three households cooking and the group eating with everyone who has hosted them. It is the right place for the exchange to become reciprocal: participants cook something from home if the ingredients can be found, show photographs of their own family and town, and say thank you to the people who have fed them. No money changes hands, no gifts of cash are given or accepted, and any small present from home is handed to the household through the programme coordinator so that nobody is placed in the awkward position of receiving more than they can return.

Cultural Insight — mushrooms, seasons and risk
Yunnan grows and eats more wild mushrooms than anywhere else in China, and the wet season from June to September is both a festival and a hazard: markets sell dozens of species, only some of which are safe, and every year there are poisonings serious enough to reach the provincial news. The farmhouse rule is that you eat what the household knows and nothing else, and that a mushroom you cannot identify with certainty is not food. It is a small illustration of a wider point about rural life: knowledge here is local and specific, and the visitor's opinion about it is worth very little.

Safeguarding and consent
Written parental consent is held for every participant under 18, and the day is supervised under a two-adult rule. Participants stay with the group and its accompanying adults in the market and do not wander off alone, accept nothing edible or drinkable from strangers, handle no tools or machinery without the household's instruction, exchange no private contact details, and take or publish no photograph of a local child or household member without explicit consent from a parent or guardian.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
With a host household or in the village guesthouse.

Morning — assembling the record
The village week is turned into something the households and the partner organisation can keep, and it has to be usable rather than decorative: a written and illustrated record of what was grown, cooked, made and repaired, with names, dates and measurements; a set of English-language classroom games and materials, written out in a form a village teacher can run without a visitor present; a short bilingual vocabulary list of the things participants learned to say; or a set of photographs, taken only where consent covers them. Work that requires the programme to keep sending money or people is deliberately not produced, because it would leave the village worse off when the relationship ends.

Late morning — presenting it, and an honest review
Participants present the record to the host families, the village representatives and the partner organisation, and then the meeting is turned over to them: what worked, what did not, what the village would change, and what the group should not have done. The questions are asked in that order on purpose. Two or three households will say, politely but clearly, that they spent more time and money than they expected to; that feedback is the most valuable output of the week, and it is recorded and acted on rather than smoothed over.

Lunch
With the host families in Kunming, and for most participants the last meal of the homestay arrangement.

Afternoon — structured reflection
The afternoon is a facilitated reflection in three parts, and it is not a group hug. First, what participants observed that they had not expected, in specific terms rather than adjectives. Second, what a three-night stay in one household can legitimately support as a conclusion, and what it cannot - the standard failure being to generalise about rural Yunnan, or about China, from a single village and a single season. Third, what the participants are going to do with it: a piece of writing, a presentation at their own school, a decision about study or work, or simply a correction to something they believed before they arrived. Each participant writes a short text of around five hundred words, which is kept by the group's own school.

Evening — farewell
The evening is left free for the host families, with a group meal for participants afterwards and a final check-in with the coordinator. Anyone who needs to raise a concern, about a placement or about anything that happened during the week, does so with a member of staff before departure, in private, and the programme's complaints and reporting route is set out again in writing.

Cultural Insight — the ethics of a short homestay
Hosting teenagers from abroad is work, and the households that do it are not paid enough for the time it takes to be worth it on money alone; most of them do it because their own children get something out of it, because the village wants the connection, and because it is a way of being looked at with interest rather than with pity. Participants who understand that tend to behave differently: they arrive prepared to be useful, they keep in touch through the programme rather than by collecting personal contacts, and they do not turn the week into a story about themselves.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
With a host family in Kunming.

Morning — Dianchi Lake & Haigeng Park
Visit Dianchi, Kunming's largest freshwater lake, and cycle the lakeside trails of Haigeng Park with views of the Western Hills. From November to March, flocks of red-billed gulls migrate here from Siberia. Rent a paddleboat or relax in the lakeside meadows.

Afternoon — Dragon Gate (Longmen)
Ride a cable car up the Western Hills to Dragon Gate, a Taoist and Buddhist cliffside complex carved into the rock. Walk narrow paths and grottoes adorned with statues, and admire panoramic views over Dianchi Lake from the summit phrase “Touch the Southern Sky.”

Evening — Wild Mushroom Hotpot
In summer, savor Yunnan's seasonal delicacy—wild mushroom hotpot—at Lost Garden Restaurant, with porcini, matsutake, and morel mushrooms simmered in a herbal broth, a must for adventurous foodies.

Morning — Shilin Stone Forest
Visit the Stone Forest (Shilin), a UNESCO Global Geopark renowned for its fairy-tale karst rock pillars sculpted over some 270 million years. Seek out the famous 'Ashima' formation and walk the maze of limestone towers, a signature wonder of Yunnan.

Lunch — near the Stone Forest
Enjoy lunch at a local restaurant near the Stone Forest.

Afternoon — Further Exploration of the Stone Forest
Continue through the geopark's lesser lanes and lakes, where reflections and rock silhouettes change with the light. Your guide explains the geology and Yi-minority legends woven around these stone spires.

Evening — at your leisure
The evening is free after a day among the rocks.

Morning — Departure from Kunming
Your guide and driver assist with checkout and transfer you to the airport for your flight home. You depart carrying memories of Yunnan's snow peaks, ancient towns, and cultural richness.

Meals
Breakfast at the hotel; meals during travel.