High excitement here at the moment with the grand opening - just 5 minutes walk from my flat - of the "2010 Winter Clothing, Kunming Characteristics Snacks Exposition". Where else, in the same huge venue, could you see the latest in knitwear and kit-kats, pullovers and popcorn, sweaters and sweeties. It's a new must-see on the Kunming tourist trail, for sure!
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I enjoyed a nice lay-in today which was perfect timing, as it turned out, with Kunming experiencing torrential rain all morning. As usual the local roads just couldn't cope and my walk downtown was more of a swim [see photo], after which I met Ava and Emily (...recently returned from 2 years in the UK) for a nice lunch. It seems like people can't stay away from Kunming for too long. My friends and fellow RSL teachers Peter and Judy arrived back from the UK yesterday for a few months back in "Mingers", and my old Kunming friend Emily arrives back today after a couple of years in England [left in photo, enjoying a last game of Mahjong with my UK friend Vix]. Then, my parents are planning a second trip here in February next year and others have promised (threatened?) to make 2011 the year they make it out here too. It's really great to have so many visitors and "returners", so why not take the plunge and come visit me (us!) in China next year! When the organisers of the, "Construction of Thoroughfares for Cultural and Media Cooperation Meeting" decided they needed some foreign faces amongst the thousand delegates for the TV cameras to pick out, they contacted Robert's School (and other places). Unfortunately Mark (a fellow teacher) and I drew the short straw and so found ourselves catching a coach to a hotel on the outskirts of Kunming at 7 o'clock this morning. The "meeting" turned out to be six hours of mind-numbingly boring speeches on, "the use of Renminbi currency as a common fiscal settlement instrument for Pan-Asian trade partners". Now I've been tricked into these thing before, so this time I came armed with a newspaper, an MP3 player and a Rubik's cube! However, after I'd finished all the news and the batteries had run out there was still 4 hours to go and there's only so much time you can spend trying to solve the Rubik's cube. So I drew a picture of a cowboy riding a horse... And if you want an idea of just how stupefyingly dull today was, just read the first sentence of the invitation letter (and yes, it's just ONE sentence!). Remember that hospital mural that has me chortling on my way back from work every Sunday (see 7.7.10 entry)? Well this section caught my eye today. The doctors seem hard at work, but what are those crazy nurses up to behind? Is this some sort of medical treatment of which I am unaware? Any suggestions in the Comments section please! A museum exhibition of firearms? Count me in! I noticed last week that the normally fairly dull Yunnan Provincial Museum was putting on a display of weaponry and so, despite a persistent cold and cough, I headed out there yesterday to check out the guns! Rather ironically, on arrival, I had to walk thorugh a metal detector and have my bag checked. With an enormous armoury a few feet away, what exactly were they afraid I would bring in? The exhibition was surprisingly well attended; mostly salivating men, but some women and children, too! I've been to the museum three times before, but never seen as many visitors as the guns attracted! All the most important firearms were on display - Gatling (an early machine gun), Colt .45 revolver, M-16 assault rifle (8 million worldwide), AK-47 (75 miliion worldwide), plus a rather worrying number of seemingly homemade Chinese guns.... In the West, kids' crazes come and go pretty rapidly but in China they tend to hang around longer, perhaps because children here have less purchasing power? You can still see skateboards and scooters on the streets here and only yesterday I saw kids playing with Pogs and Pokemon cards. And the king of the crazes - Rubik's Cube - is alive and well in Kunming (make that "Kubeming"?). I've seen lots of varieties; the normal 3x3x3, a 4x4x4 and even a 5x5x5. Triangular and spherical "cubes" are also in the shops. Most intriguing of all are a 2x2x2 (harder than you'd think) and the hollow cube I bought yesterday [see photo above]. I even saw a Rubik's Cube statue [see photo below] in the road on a random bus journey today! Craze-y! Yesterday I was asked, at very short notice, to teach a one-to-one lesson with a Kunming banker who needed to know about the British banking system. Apparently she was due to have a phone interview with a British bank manager a few hours after my class about a job in the London branch of the Bank of China! Now what I know about British banking can be written on the back of a postage stamp, but hey-ho! When she arrived 45 minutes late for our hour's lessons I was a bit miffed. And her excuse that "a hotel had fallen onto her bus" seemed unnecessarily elaborate. But it turns out she wasn't lying. A demolition of the Yunnan Hotel went very wrong this morning, spilling onto a busy road and injuring 5 people, one seriously. Thankfully my hastily Googled banking summary was just what she was after and she left happy (and uninjured). Yet another trip to the dentist today. It's the last one until September, when they start work on the left side of my mouth! As ever, it was the usual mix of good and bad - I got bumped to the front of the queue (although there were only two folk ahead of me) but then had to endure the usual procession of random people wandering into the treatment room to chat to my dentist while I was being drilled and filled. I just had to hope she wasn't too distracted. I am lucky though to have a dental teaching hospital just 5 minutes walk from my flat, and the wonderful Prof. Liu Juan as my "personal" dentist. Trained in the USA and now teaching other dentists in Kunming, she has excellent English and a very kind demeanour. She also encourages me to ring her personal phone if I have any pain or wish to make an appointment, which I doubt any UK dentist would! Mind you, I have seen quite a lot of her over the last 2-3 years. She's repaired two chipped teeth, built and installed two crowns and given me 11 or more fillings. Thankfully, dental work here is about half the price as in the UK though, on my wages, still a significant expense. And it always feels a bit odd to be paying someone to inflict pain... Short of anything obvious to blog about, I popped my camera into my school bag today, thinking I could take a photo of one of my classes. I needn't have worried. An almighty crunch as I walked out of my flat proved to be two buses who had both decided to head for the same bus stop at the same time! The drivers were not showing any bus company loyalty either, shouting noisily at each other in the road. Where are the action replays and Formula One stewards when you need them? With the destruction of Kunming's balconies still I full swing, and with more and more flats starting to look like jail blocks, I sense a small revolution underway. One of the qualities I admire in the Chinese is the way they are preparded to lose fights in order to win the longer-term war! Thus, there are no big demonstrations when parts of their property suddenly get demolished but, give it a few weeks for the fuss to die down, and pseudo-balconies are already starting to reappear! That's right, you'll never stop the Chinese drying their clothes and, with the untimely demise of those very useful balcony railings, alternatives are already springing up everywhere [see photos] - poles between windows, expanding drying racks and even small baskets hung from the (supposedly beautiful) jail bars! Yes folks, balcony revolution is underway! Kunming's taxis are usually plentiful and cheap enough, with generally friendly and honest drivers. But one of their most annoying practices is the shift change at 6.30pm, right in the middle of the rush hour. This means that the taxis refuse to go to various places from 6.00pm onwards if it takes them too far from where they have to swap to the new driver for his 12 hour shift. Taxis are almost impossible to find between 6.00 and 7.00pm. But as of last week, the Kunming Government have made it illegal for taxis to swap drivers from 7.00 and 9.00am, or from 5.00 to 7.30pm. I can't say I've noticed any difference as yet, but it's a step in the right direction, especially with so many roads currently being ripped up to build the first of Kunming's new subway lines. Mind you, if desperate, you could always get a lift on a tricycle [see photo] - they seem to carry anything and everything! The destinations of a few of the dozen or so buses that stop outside my flat are still unknown to me. I can't read the Chinese characters on the bus route signs and, even when I can, I don't know where the places are in Kunming. There's nothing quite like a map, a notebook and sense of adventure! So the other day I jumped onto the first "mystery" bus that came along to see where it led. It was the start of a lovely and lucky afternoon. After about 45 minutes, the bus terminated outside the Kunming Botanical Gardens (somewhere now very much on my list of places to visit) and just down the road from Black Dragon Pool Park [see photo]. I've been there once before last year with Ava, for our first proper date! On the journey there, however, I'd noticed a small sign pointing to a Daoist Temple, 1km away. So on the way back I jumped off the bus and determined to try and find it... easier said than done, as it happened. The road suddenly ended when crossed by a dual carriageway, still under construction [see photo]. A few enquiries suggested the old road continued across the dual carriageway, so I headed on. The village at the end of the road smelled awful - sewers overflowing - and still no sign of the temple. A local lady spotted me looking here and there. She kindly offered to show me the way to the temple. I'm not sure I'd have found it otherwise, as it was down a series of small alleyways. But I could hear it due to the dozens of little bells there, tinkling in the breeze. The temple turned out to be well worth effort, though. The Daoist monks - both men and women - were decked out in traditional robes and were very friendly, insisting on giving me fruit and wanting to chat. There were only a couple of other (Chinese) visitors, and no tickets or guards (as most Chinese temples have these days).The temple walls have wonderful murals on, depicting ancient religious stories. They looked fresh without seeming too new or tacky. There was a fantastic 3D diorama on the back of one temple, featuring a host of deities riding a large tidal wave. And inside the various temple halls were some enormous statues (the monks asked me not to photograph them). It was one of the quietest, most interesting and friendly temples I've ever been to in China. What a lucky find! I'll certainly be back! The nearest four shops to my flat are all shoe shops, so imagine my anticipation when one of them closed down recently and the decor was swiftly ripped out. My mind raced with the possibilities of what it might transform into - a bakery, a confectioners, a dairy shop, even a dry cleaners? So I was gutted when it reopened last week as ...yes, you guessed it... yet another shoe shop. Different livery, different brands, same old shoes. Now I ask you, are all the barefooted people of Kunming ever really likely to congregate at the corner of my litle street for a mass purchase? The Kunming police are now officially sponsored by Coca Cola! 500 of these tents have sprung up around Kunming, so that the police can observe the traffic in the shade. Not that I've actually seen a policeman in one as yet. They are just another obstacle on the increasingly crowded pavements. Rumour has it that whilst heroin remains illegal, the police are now turning a blind eye to coke ... haha! D-Day has arrived (D standing for dirt and destruction)! The wreckers from TBTB (the powers that be) have finally arrived to demolish the balconies in my living room and bedroom. Thankfully the kitchen and spare room can keep their balconies, as they don't overlook a public road. Since those two are used to house my kitchen sink and for drying clothes respectively I am, at least, losing the two least used balconies. The workers have been smashing and crashing all day long, so I've been resigned to not leaving the house and yet getting very little done (at least I managed to get to the gym yesterday for my first "gentle" workout in 8 months!). The first crew arrived at 8am this morning and put in some new and very poor quality windows flush to the wall - a really shoddy job - and left my wooden floor strewn with glass shards, nails and screws, excess lumps of grouting, cigarette butts and a thick layer of dust. Then, this afternoon, just as I cleaned away the worst of rubbish, the second crew arrived and proceeded to smash the balconies off, and screw hideous silver burglar bars to the outside of the windows (the sort that ensure you can't possibly escape in the event of a fire). Yet more cleaning up and now my flat is, apparently, "legal and beautiful" once more. After weeks of nagging, Ava finally laid aside her various excuses and took a day off work to drive me to the "Dwarf Empire". We were told it was just 30 minutes away, but we finally arrived after an exhausting 2½ hrs - a combination of a rather wild underestimate and getting a bit lost! First stop was an enormous plastic fake tree stump [see photo] atop a hill. Despite being hollow, you weren't allowed in it or on it and no one could quite explain what the point of it was. But it was big! Next door was "the biggest butterfly park in China". There were disappointingly few butterflies actually there though (I think we spotted a dozen in half an hour). But it was certainly big! And then on to the highlight of the day, the "Dwarf Empire". About 80 dwarves from all over China live and work here, none more than 1.3m (4ft) high. They were all very friendly and, when asked, said they really enjoyed living and working in the park. They quite genuinely asked me to invite some western dwarves to come join them there... as if! The big show was due to start at 3.30pm. The park claims to get 4000 visitors a day (surely a typo?) but as the singing and dancing started, Ava and I were the only visitors in the huge outdoor auditorium. So when she sidled off (claiming the sun was too hot) there were nearly a hundred dwarves performing just for me - quite bizarre! All were dressed in fancy clothes, singing, dancing, doing magic and acrobatics, it was a wild spectacle. Where else but China could you see something like that? After the show Ava and I wandered around the mushroom houses where the dwarves are supposed to live (they actually told me they have accommodation outside the park). But the houses are still very cute [see photo]. We also climbed a steep hill behind the houses to explore a huge (fake) castle, devoid of visitors, before heading back. It was such a nice feeling for me to "climb a hill" without any dizziness or headaches. Ava didn't enjoy the long drive to the park, and suggested I drive back to the main highway as, "there are never any police on the country roads". I decided not to risk it (I haven't got my Chinese license ...yet) and it turned out to be a very wise decision as we came across a flipped car [see photo] right outside the park gates, with police and ambulance in attendance! I had a visit from the "Balcony Police" today. For those who haven't followed this crazy story so far, TPTB (the powers that be) have decided that all overhanging balconies are ugly and, in an effort to win a "Beautiful City of China" award, they are currently demolishing literally thousands of them. (You might think that their money would be better spent helping the hundreds of villages around the city that currently have no water or crops due to the ongoing drought?). The lady who came today to measure my balcony agreed with me privately that the new flattened facades and silver gratings were, in fact, a lot uglier than the old ornate cages [see photo], but that she was just "doing her job". The demolishers are coming sometime next week. It seems my recent blog entry recording "only" hundreds of deaths in the Qinghai earthquake was premature. The number of dead has now risen to over 2000. And yet how soon it drops off the international news agenda. I sometimes see horses very early in the morning in streets of Kunming (they are banned during the day). But today, on the way to get a liver function blood test at the hospital, is the first time I've seen a camel being led down the street! Who would have thought it, especially on a day like today? One of Kunming's newest attractions is "Dwarf Empire", a theme park populated by little people (max. height: 1.3m / 4ft). Some sing and dance in twice daily shows, some clean the streets, some serve food and some chat with the tourists. They all live in little mushroom-shaped houses [see photo]. I kid you not! Is this all just crass discrimination and exploitation? Well the eighty or so dwarves themselves seem very happy, apparently. Rather than trying to eke out a living in a country which prefers to hide disability rather than cater for it, they earn a decent wage at the park and get free food and accomodation. Lin Sun, one of the dwarves, is quoted as saying, "It's really pretty good here. There isn't much for us to do workwise in the outside world other than bar or promotional work which is generally humiliating." The theme park hit the international headlines recently when The New York Times ran a story on it, but then accidentally attributed a photo of two of the dwarves as "Hilary Clinton and the Chilean President" ...Ooops! [see photo] I went to a travelling freak show in China once and, fascinating as it was, I wasn't qute sure whether I was helping the performers through my entrance fee, or perpetuating their situation. Maybe both? But I think "Dwarf Empire" deserves a visit. Only in China...! The latest brainwave of the Kunming local goverment is to remove all balconies and burglar cages overlooking streets. This is happening at a bewildering rate - we heard rumours about it just over a month ago, posters went up a couple of weeks later and teams of workmen are now ripping balconies down all around town. In the photo you can see the bottom floor has been done, with the floors above to come. My flat is due to be "sorted" next week, one of hundreds, possibly thousands, in Kunming. I thought at first that it might be a safety measure but no, this is China - I'm reliably informed it's part of a scheme to help Kunming compete in the "most beautiful city in China" competition! I'm not convinced it looks lot better. The local government has also banned outside dining at restaurants, increased the number of road-sweepers and planted 800,000 trees! All very well, but I lose my balcony!! One of my all-time favourite films is Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". A really spectacular movie. The "first kind" of alien encounter is spotting a UFO. The "second kind" is physical evidence. The "third kind" is actual contact! So the other day I was interested to watch a new film called, "Fourth Kind", which suggests that alien abduction is the fourth type of contact, and alleges to be based on true stories. I was chatting to Ava about this when she mentioned that she has seen UFOs a few times near her house, and had photos of some of them on her mobile phone! I was intrigued... ...This one was a bright green light seen from her window, in a place where no light is usually to be seen. Ava took the photo on her phone and later spotted a streak of light across the sky beneath it on the photograph [highlighted red]. The green light faded and disappeared after a few minutes. You can just about make out a hexagon shape in this photo. Ava spotted It floating above the Kunming skyline and snapped it on her phone. It hovered there for a while and then slowly "flew" off. The most amazing event was one that Ava didn't manage to photograph. Reading a book by her bedroom window at 3am (she sometimes has trouble sleeping), she was disturbed by a bright yellow light in the sky, hovering about 10m from her house. It was rotating on its axis and gradually changed from yellow to white. Suddenly, it shot upwards into the night sky and out of sight. There are certainly some weird goings on in Kunming!! It's only been due to recent rides in Ava's car that I've started to realise just how busy Kunming's roads have become, especially at rush hours. Buses often have their own lane, so you don't notice it so much. With 1.1 million cars registered in a city of 6 million people, the proportion of people with a car is one of the highest in China. And a further 900 cars are registered in Kunming every day. Yes, every day! Add to that the nearly 2000 fatalities from traffic accidents in Yunnan every year and you start to see the problem. Kunming's government are trying to tackle the increasing pollution problem by requiring cars to pass an exhaust test, and are asking motorists not to use their phone while driving, to stop driving through red lights and not to change lanes at random. Somehow I doubt the driving will improve that quickly. I was wandering around Green Lake yesterday after a gossip-catch-up lunch with Mark, one of the other foreign teachers at my school. It's a lovely place for a stroll in the sunshine, and some of the Chinglish is truly world class [see photo]. Best not to look too closely at the murky lake itself during the day, but at night it makes for a pretty setting [see photo]. Unfortunately, on this trip I found my favourite Thai restaurant all boarded up. And then I took the usual bus home to find they have changed the route and it now no longer goes to the stop outside my flat. Have I really been away that long? This week sees the Kunming local government’s valiant attempt to stop people spitting in the city. Each day 116,000 antibacterial phlegm bags will be distributed in streets, at bus stops etc by the wonderfully named, "Kunming Municipal National Hygiene City Establishment Task Force"! I wish them every success, but frankly I fear they have no chance of breaking such an ingrained habit. People here spit all the time and all over the place - even in the corridors of my school, unless I spot them first! It’s often the first sound I hear when I wake up. At least someone in leadership has at last recognised how unhygienic and unsavoury it all is. |
AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
May 2024
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