Our minority cultures, let me show you them

This will be short, since the keyboard I'm using has sticky keys and I'm supposed to meet up with people soon and and and and and
The day before yesterday I hopped an obscenely early flight to Kunming, in the southern Yunnan province, for two weeks of solid, regimented, IES-organized fun. I slept more or less for the entire plane flight there (this is a testament to how sleepy I was), but perked up once arriving in Kunming, the "city of eternal spring". The climate was indeed pleasant and springy, but the city itself didn't impress me much - there just wasn't anything to do, short of shop fruitlessly, which I did. I also visited a pleasant park with a group of people and went on the bumper cars with some overzealous middle-aged Chinese men, but I went to bed that night feeling like I'd exhausted most of Kunming's possibilities.
Fortunately (?) the next day was full of scheduled activity time, which started with a Kunming lunch specialty - noodles and meat cooked in hot broth - and continued with the most fruitless field trip ever, to Asia's largest flower auction house. This had a lot of potential, but the auction was not for about six hours, so the giant warehouse was largely empty, occupied only by a handful of bouquets and some people doing quality control (checking to make sure the flowers were pretty enough? I don't know). Kunming also has a legendary flower market, but we don't get to visit that until the last day of our trip so we can bring the flowers back to the Beezh with us.
After that we headed to Xi Shan (the Western Hills park outside of the city) for a wonderfully short hike up to the Dragon Gate, an altar dedicated to dragons and various Daoist deities. If our guide had it correct, the symbolism was as follows: the carp on one side of the gate symbolized an ordinary person who hadn't yet taken the Confucian government exams. By jumping over the gate (the exams) the carp could turn into a dragon (a bureaucrat). This was ridiculous, but I had a good popsicle on the way down so I considered the activity a draw, fun-wise. We went back to the town center for a stunning dinner on my friend Andrew's recommendation and then walked back along the lake, near which all the buildings were lit up with twinkling neon lights. I suddenly found myself with a new love for Kunming; the scene reminded me of Sanlitun without all the drunk morons and with personality.
We arrived at the hotel ready to take our sleeper train to the smaller town of Dali. I had never really traveled by train before, and based on last night, I wouldn't recommend it. The bunks were pretty much the same thing as graham crackers (in terms of stability, thickness, softness, square footage...everything except delicious taste, not that I tried) and stacked three high. The train also made periodic ten-minute stops waiting for other trains to switch tracks, which disrupted my sleep whenever it happened. All in all, a rough night for sleep.
We arrived in Dali tired and smelly this morning, and after a mediocre breakfast and some showers set off for a pretty good lunch in a touristy hotel. Afterwards came the Nightmare Forced Cultural Experience that was the Bai Minority Cultural Villa. Our intinerary had promised us a visit to a "traditional Bai village" so I was dismayed to see that the village was more like a theme park - you had to pay to get in, and once there, you could watch locals of questionable ethnicity unsmilingly shuffle their way through "traditional" Bai dances* wearing cheap, polyester costumes and Nikes. The entire thing really pissed me off for some reason I can't fully put my finger on; I guess it just bothers me that people are bastardizing and dumbing down this culture to make it a tourist attraction for stupid white people (and also stupid Han Chinese people, apparently). These people and their culture aren't Disneyland, and they aren't there so that their customs can be pimped out, ogled at, and then purchased. I wanted to ask our guide how many gift shops the traditional Bai villages had, but I forgot the word for "gift shop" which was probably for the best. All that aside, I'm a little annoyed at the way the trip is set up - we've seen some neat things, but all the restaurants we've eaten at with the group have been touristy and empty, and when I came to China I intended to live the life of a student local, not a tourist.
Happily, we next moved on to some random lady's** actual traditional Bai house, where she taught us how to make cheese with the milk from her actual cow, who was hanging out in the stable about twenty feet from everyone else. I did not try my hand at the cheesemaking, but some of my friends did, and it did not look easy. The cheese was malleable and dough-like in its new form but was then wound around thin poles to dry before this family sold it. The family was incredibly warm and kind to us, and I couldn't help but notice that despite their traditional clothes and way of life, the TV in the living room was a big hit.
Finally, we went to a tye-dye factory nearby. The Bai are credited with inventing tye-dye, and we got a brief run-through of all the steps and a taste of some indigo tea, which was actually blue. It was interesting enough, but I was happy to get back to the hotel and have some time to explore on my own.
I have some really mixed feelings about this trip so far - all the best times I've had have come spontaneously, instead of being a forced march by an overly-enthusiastic tour guide. I think traveling is almost better with one or two people, where you can just do what you want on your own schedule. The level of touristiness here is also pretty appalling - I can understand why it exists, but IES has been operating here for close to 20 years, and I'd hoped they could come up with more authentic things for us to do.*** All in all, I'm really looking forward to getting back to Beijing for more Chinese (I feel like our language lessons have gone by the wayside here) and more chances to explore on my own.

*I'm pretty sure one of the men's dances was taken directly from the Broadway version of Jersey Boys.

**To the best of my knowledge, our guide literally picked this woman up off the street. WUT.

***And with better nightlife. There are seriously no good clubs anywhere near anywhere we're going. Is one night of dancing too much to ask?