kunming

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hard to still write about my travelling now that in fact i'm already sitting here back in vienna in my flat where i can see just a view chinese signs when i take a look out of the window at the chinese restaurant on the other side of the street. but i want to finish this blog as long as my memories are still fresh and i'm not completely back in my every-day life.

the sleeper bus from dali stopped at some point around 4 in the morning and i decided to keep on sleeping rather than to make use of this break. when i woke up around 7 again we were still parking at the same point and the suisse guy (whom i falsely introduced as a belgian in my last entry) was standing outside lighting a cigarette. i got up and when i stepped out of the bus, i realized that we actually were already standing in kunming since 4 and that the bus driver just let us sleep. very kind of him. now we had to find him to get our backpacks out of the storage room, which was no real problem. he was also sleeping in one of the beds.
the suisse guy (it's a pity that i forgot his name) and i walked together for a while and split up then because he wanted to go on to laos and had to get a visa. i went to a hostel of which i had found a flyer in chengdu. it was a very nice place (Cloudland) with clean rooms and showers, a big terrace on the roof and even some western style toilets.
after i had checked in and had breakfast i went to the railway station to get a ticket to guilin for the next day. this time i really took care that i would get a hard-sleeper for the right day. it was not too easy since the train i wanted was already booked out but i could get a ticket for a later train. i just knew the departure time: 22:30 and went back to the hostel to look up the arrival time in the internet. i was 3 am on the 2nd day after departure: thus it would take 28 hours to get there. pretty slow train and pretty stupid time to arrive in a city but at least i would get there. the rest of the day i spent with just running around in kunming. i didn't see anything very special but still i felt comfortable there. in the evening i went to a nice bar to eat something and afterwards back to the hostel and watched a movie before going to bed.
on the next day i went to some kind of students quarter and found a bookshop that sold some used english and german books and decided for a german translation of a faulkner-book to have something to read in the train. i went on to the park where i sat down at the lake to read a little bit. soon a chinese guy came towards me to talk with me for a while. he was a student here in kunming, english name andy and he was a very kind guy. we had a nice conversation and went to have lunch together in some noodle restaurant. afterwards we visited the university campus were we could help a girl to translate a chinese business card into english. i went back to the hostel alone and wrote the entry about dali, saw a movie and went to catch the train.
the journey to guilin was long but it was calm and i read the whole faulkner on the train. for some time i thought we could arrive already in the afternoon in guilin because the landscape already looked quite similar to the one i knew from photos and besides i was hard to imagine why it took this train 28 hours, when another could make it in 18 hours. i guess i will never solve this mistery. anyway by asking the conductor i shattered this dream faster than it had appeared in my mind.

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Photos

the park in kunming
i don't know why it was impossible for me to hold the camera straight