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Published: October 26th 2005
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I'm not much interested in cards
a card game catches the attention of some but not others on the streets on Kunming Kunming was our last stop in China and it was a great place to end the journey. Although it is still fairly busy and polluted here it is a little more relaxed than the rest of the places we have visited, the people are the friendliest we have met in China and they don't stare at you quite as much, probably because there are quite a few foreigners here.
We were staying in a really nice hostel here that served great, and very cheap, food and drink, we've cetainly filled up for our trip to South East Asia, Andrew has inherited another nickname, we now call him "Doughboy" due to his unquestionable ability, and desire, to eat as much bread and bread like products that he can get his hands on, he's a growing laddie, or so he keeps telling me....
We had a bit of paperwork to get through here, visa's for Vietnam and Laos, flights to Laos and changing money into the different currencies of the next few countries, it all takes time and it's not an easy job in China, in fact nothing is really easy in China but getting your paws on foreign currency has
Get yir fruit he-urrr........
often a call heard on the streets of Kunming. to be one of the hardest things we've done this year, as Andrew proclaimed during our 'meeting' with the manager of the local Bank of China "it was easier to climb your f'n wall!!, I only want some US dollars!!!"
Most of our time in Kunming was spent wandering about, we didn't really 'see' anything as such, well we never went out of our way to visit anything, we just kind of driffted in and out of places and tried to mingle with the locals. Andrew was happy that some foreigner, I think he was Italian, came up to him to talk about United when he had his Arab top on, in fact it happened twice in one day, the other boy was an Israeli who had lived in Dundee for a year, it made "Doughboy's" day. He then tried to tell some Chinese waiter in a restaurant who DUFC were but the boy could only say "David Beckham" and that was the end of that conversation.
One day we walked about taking random photo's of people in normal everyday positions, Andrew was moving about like David Bailey trying to get the right light while not getting spotted,
This dude thought he was captain cool
but he really looked like a 'janny' with those keys on his trews and he has a dug in his bike. Totally not cool. I just watched and laughed when he got caught, xie xie (thank-you) was offered then we moved on.
So we leave China having worked our way from North East to South West, we only visited 4 places but we did see the biggest and the smalles of towns along the way, we never made it down the East coast to Shanghai and on to Honk Kong, mainly because of the timescales that we had but also due to the cost of visiting these huge cities, we've seen similar in Japan and we decided to try something different down the West Coast.
China is quite exhausting but always entertaining, it's hard to do everyday things here and even harder to get from A - B, we enjoyed our time here, especially in Beijing, but it won't be the first place that we return to when we have our annual holidays in future. It's cheap and has lots of amazing things to see but it's also dirty (outside of Beijing) and not in the top ten of the world most hygienic places for sure, and the people are generally rude.
When all is said and done China was a
It's a race....
I've got my money on the boy with the playboy bag, he's super fast... great place to visit, the staring gets to you after a while and if one more person sticks a camea in my face I'll scream, but apart from that we did enjoy our time here but at the same time are looking forward to getting to the relative peace and quiet of Laos, next stop Vientaine.
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