Hna Kunming

... the old, musty mickey mouse duvet covers and we both try to fall asleep while the driver plays screechy Chinese opera music. <br>Surprisingly, the beds are quite comfortable despite being on the small side and the driver makes regular stops for fag breaks, toilet and food. <br><br>SEPTEMBER 25th<br><br>We wake at sunrise to find we have arrived at the border. Women outside beckon us to change our money and most of the passenger has alighted with their boxes. <br ...

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... walking the campus, visiting friends or reading. Although Naruo looks down on commercial artists, money was once the biggest obstacle to realizing his cultural preservation dream. In 2000, the year he returned to China, he spent 50,000 yuan (7,400 U.S. dollars) on a half hectare of land together with houses in his hometown to build a cultural center, where leading foreign and Chinese artists could live, communicating with local artists and residents. "They can ...

So we sent our resumes off to various school and now we are just waiting. In the meantime we thought we should find a place to live. Some of the apartments we viewed were pretty insane. One apartment was covered knee deep in trash, every room in the whole place was full of rubbish, we walked in and couldn't even imagine how it would look if it wasn't full of ...

... sweater, and wool jacket I felt comfortable at night for the first time in months. After an uninspiring and fairly long walk to the hostel we arrived rather famished but naturally too late to duck into any of the nearby restaurants. However, we gladly used the excuse to order a grilled chicken sandwich, which in hindsight, was rather mediocre but at the time was perfectly delectable. Kunming, like many Chinese ...

... and the result is surprisingly delicious. Kunming seems to be a city that is changing remarkably quickly. My previous teacher told me how as a child she used to live in central Kunming in a pretty courtyard house where she could pick grapes from the vines that grew over the courtyard. Now, the very same area is somewhere beneath tall glass buildings containing offices and department stores, and she lives with her parents ...

... reading by Wang Xiao. He asked if I spoke English and sat down to the table with some homework. I thought he was taking English classes, and he spoke reasonable enough English, but it turns out it was his daughter's homework and he was reviewing her answers and wanted to make sure he was right. For the second time that day, Professor Hari came out and I spent about an hour working through sentence completion, multiple choice and reading comp questions. It ...

... out whether this was just as a result of the festival, or whether the youth of Kunming have more interest in religion than in other parts of the country - will have to visit some more temples in the next few weeks to try and find out more... While I was there a performance was going on of local culture (there are a lot of minority groups that come from Yunnan Province) with an orchestra, singing and dancing. The orchestra itself was slightly ramshackle. The ...

... I'M BACK! <br><br>...and it was quite an effort to get here. The travel day/night to get to Kunming was one of those really bad ones. One minibus dropped me off kilometers from where I needed to go (despite his clear agreement to bring me there); a travel agent refused to sell me an overnight sleeper bus ticket at the agreed price after meeting me and finding out I was Western; the bus station manager charged me 3 yuan too much for my ticket without my knowledge ...