Kunming

After two days in Dali and a five hour bus trip, we found ourselves in Kunming and in the care of a new guide, “Jonathan”. Kunming is just like any other big Chinese city, except without the scenic parks, gentrified “historic shopping streets”, quiet teahouses or vast temples that bring charm to parts of cities like Shanghai, Hangzhou, etc. We were there for two nights, finishing off our Yunnan tour before heading northeast to Beijing.

Jonathan, though eager to help out, soon proved to be annoying and, there’s no other way of saying it, too Chinese. After lunch and a tour through the loud and crowded outdoor Bird and Flower market, which in addition to Birds, Flowers and all manner of live bird food had stall after stall of worthless junk, we wanted to go back to the hotel to relax a bit, and spent about 10 minutes convincing him that no, we did not want to go have tea in his friend’s shop nearby and then get dinner, we’d just eaten and would rather go relax a bit. In any case it was nice to have him help us get from place to place, take us around a Daoist temple outside the city, go on an epic DVD shopping excursion, and get to the airport early Saturday morning. Friday afternoon we treated ourselves at the hotel “health room”; Karen and I got massages and my mom a foot reflexology treatment (it started by soaking her feet in a bucket of liquid that, to her dismay, began to coagulate into a thick gelatin). The masseuse was probably one of the funniest people I’ve met in China: during the massage she chatted to me about my study, the relative independence of American kids versus Chinese, etc. She told me a joke involving Chinese grammar nuances and an American who didn’t understand tones (it was funny, I promise), and later talked to me about stocks and finance, asking for vocabulary words like “bonds”.