Jintai Hotel Kunming

... bamboo huts on stilts. Everyone's house is wooden with a thatched roof and no toilet.... yet every village has a huge satellite dish?! Children, chickens, dogs and cats run around on the side of the road, the sky is blue, the air is clean... absolute bliss! <br>We stop for lunch which lasts for ages and I end up complaining to the driver to get a move on. We hit the road again and after a few hours stop at a town - I get off looking for a loo and the men shout ...

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Wow, in one fell swoop Bob and I got work and an apartment yesterday. A bit surprised it happened so quickly. I think it helped that we knew Ryan who worked there before. The apartment is nicer in many ways than any other apartments we viewed here, its furnished, fairly central and big, 2 bedrooms so we can have a study, but the bathroom is horrendous. I just don't know how to deal with it, the ...

... lunch we managed to find a small whole in the wall packed with locals, a sign the world-over of good food to be had. I'm not entirely sure what I ate but to the best of my knowledge I think it was sweat potato noodles with yak meat seasoned with liberal amounts of peppers that would have made Hunan proud. A little overly satisfied Christa and I reluctantly prepared to leave Kunming and made our way to the bus station.

... it (import duties on foreign luxury goods are vast here) - I'm not holding out much hope for his paintwork though. Just down the road from my building is a massive, very new and very luxurious looking department store - Cartier, Dior, Louis Vuitton, all the big names you'd expect in the west all have gleaming stores manned by numerous shop assistants. The only set-back currently seems to be that there really aren't any ...

... reading this, you are doing the great and thankless work. Wang invited me out for dinner with his family, and I met his wife, his adorable 16-year old daughter Fanglan and her friend Qingwen for some good Yunnan rice noodles. The restaurant had a traditional ethnic minority dances going on with people and clothing from the various ethnicities. Wang is an EE with a master's degree and spent two years in Italy about a decade ago and his wife is a high school ...

... with many and varied costume changes - most of the locals visiting the temple didn't seem too keen to watch them though , and I couldn't help but wonder whether they hold a similar level of affection as Morris dancers do to us - groups of faintly ridiculed people embracing past traditions while dressed in gaudy polyester outfits and only of interest to camera-wielding tourists - still, I enjoyed it, and did indeed take plenty of photos. The temple itself ...

... residents. The first thing I noticed about the city is the noise - or lack of it. I guess I've become accustomed to non-stop honking and loud motorbikes crowding every street. That's life in SEA. In Kunming there is virtually no honking even in heavy traffic. Electric motorbikes scoot everywhere without making a sound. I've nearly been run over they are so quiet. <br><br>Yunnan itself is one of China's most visited provinces with attractions like Tiger Leaping Gorge ...