The Yin Yang Experience

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In Chinese tradition there is always a yin and yang that go together, like opposite forces of one another. How appropriate then that after such a brilliant day out yesterday, we were faced with the opposite experience today. I guess you just aren't allowed to have it good all the time.

The problems started this morning when we wanted to make our hostel booking for our next leg of the tour which will be in Sapa, Vietnam. We have been using a tea house that has a couple of cheap but dodgy computers to update the blog but notcied there were several viruses and worms on the system which meant it wouldn't be safe to make a credit card booking online. Instead we decided to pay the high fee (10 Yuan an hour) to use the hotel internet room as we figured this would be safer. For some reason though, an hour later we still hadn't been able to make the booking. Feeling a tad miffed, we went out to a cafe down the road which has just one single computer but we didn't fare any better. The internet is incredibly slow in China at the bst of times but when you need to make a booking somewhere and the payment page keeps timing out, it's unbelievably frustrating. We were going to have to come up with a new strategy somehow.

Any how, a couple of days ago we made plans to meet our new friend, Spring, again so we found the bus stop and waited for a bus to come - and waited and waited and waited some more. We waited half an hour with no sign of the bus we needed (usually there's one every couple of minutes). We resorted to getting a taxi but the traffic was bad on the roads and we were over 10 minutes late getting to our meeting point. When we arrived, we were disheartened to see that Spring was nowhere to be seen. We wondered if perhaps she was angry with us as we had been late turning up for the English Corner (thanks to the buses again) but a few minutes later David, a friend of Spring's who we had met at the English Corner, turned up with a message from Spring, saying that she had been called in to work unexpectedly and wouldn't be able to make it. We were naturally very disappointed but this was shortlived as David mentioned that he wasn't doing anything and would be happy to spend the afternoon with us :-))

Now David is a bit of a computer geek, so he and Glynn wasted no time in getting down to discussing some of the important things in life - gaming, hardware specifications, programming.....you get the idea. I left them to it as we wandered through the park surrounding Kunming's Green Lake. It was a hot day and all opf Kunming seemed to have had the same idea as us to go to the park. It was a lovely setting with water lilies (known here as lotus flowers) bobbing on the surface of the cleaner than usual lake, geese and ducks lying in the shade of bamboo groves and maple trees and families laughing and playing together by the water's edge. On the way round we sampled some food from the street sellers gathered along the paths including undercooked baked potatoes and chilli coated tofu chunks.

As we made our way around the lake, I managed to persuade the boys to hire a pedalo for an hour, which was great fun. It only cost 30 Yuan (about 2 pounds) and with the men at the helm doing all the hard work on the pedals, Jish and I sat back and enjoyed the sunshine. What made the ride even more fun was saying hello to all the people in the other pedalos. David had confessed to us that he is single, so we were on a mission to find him a suitable bit of skirt. Every so often we spotted a boat with some young girls in so Glynn steered towards them and tried to get David talking. Alas most of the girls we talked to were too young for the poor chap and he went away empty handed. I also had fun waving and saying hello to lots of kids and was rewarded with beaming smiles that made the morning's internet problems simply melt away.

After wearing out my good hubbie and our new friend, we walked around the lake once more before veering off course for a beer at the Yunnan University. The building and grounds are pretty and there's a nice, relaxed atmosphere about the place. Students were dotted around, sat out in the sun with their books open but fast asleep. It was a really mellow time of day and the beer was a nice reward for the guys after peddalling for a whole hour. David then let slip that he can't handle alcohol very well and it was brilliant fun watching him stagger back to the park after just one bottle of the cold stuff! We made our way back to the original meeting place by the big Wal-Mart and said our goodbyes after arranging to meet up again tomorrow to see the bird and flower market. I suggested maybe he could let Spring know in case she was free as we would really like to see her again before we go. We popped into the supermarket to get some food for dinner and I picked up a couple of cool t-shirts from a little shop nearby. We bussed it back to the hotel, had dinner and went over to the tea house to try out the internet again. This time Glynn had a new trick with the hostel booking and we are now finally booked into the hotel we wanted :-)) So the day that started off so badly ended up having a happy ending. I guess there's a lot of truth to this whole Yin Yang thing after all....

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