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Christmas in Kunming

Kunming is not very remarkable as a city, but we decided to spend Christmas here since we could stay in a nice hostel with great facilities and also have access to everything the big city can provide. Also, it makes a decent transportation hub for places we want to see in the area. Transportation within the city, however is another story... There are also some great cheap DVD shops which is just what we needed for some holiday down-time.

Our Christmas tradition at home is to have a fondue on Christmas-eve, so we decided to go for the Chinese variant of fondue – the hot-pot. We headed out for dinner and foolishly forgot our trusty Chinese-English food menu. We haven’t needed it in a while since most places we’ve been to recently have had English/picture menus. Sadly, this restaurant had neither English nor pictures and our Mandarin just isn’t quite there. So Kathie, resourceful as she is, went from table to table searching for the items that we wanted for our hot-pot and pointed them out to our server as she found them. We had fun with it although it was the spiciest hot-pot we’ve ever tasted and required several beers to put out the fire.

Christmas day was spent doing laundry and hanging out at the hostel. We also managed to make some skype calls home to family which was really great.

Jianshui

On boxing day we headed to the town of Jianshui. The main reasons for visiting this town was to see the Twin Dragon Bridge and to wander the "old" town of Jianshui. The Twin dragon bridge is apparantly one of the 10 oldest bridges in China. The "old" town of Jianshui was fun to wander around, bearing in mind that it was kind of new-old style China, rebuilt to look like it would have during the Qing dynasty. One or two nights here is probably the most anyone would need, but our pace has slowed quite a bit lately and we stayed for three nights.

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Photos

HOT pot
Full of chillis and sichuan pepper. The numbing sensation of the sichuan pepper is supposed to offset the fire of the chillis. Really, you just can't feel your mouth it's that hot.

Black pepper beef
Our favorite dish in Jianshui. We ate them out of black pepper sauce.

Laundry on xmas day
What better way to spend Christmas day.

Comments

[The Travel Camel]

Beautiful!

[Erika]

Your pictures are amazing!!! are you two not homesick yet?? LOL