Blogs from Kunming, Yunnan, China, Asia - page 12

It's been almost a month since I last posted an entry. I hope nobody's lost faith in me. May was an eventful month! I had my first serious Chinese tests ever, and mangosteens arrived in Kunming! The purple mangosteen is a tropical fruit with the high distinction of being the opposite of durian! Durian is a bad, bad fruit that smells like rotting shellfish and vegetables and tastes like stringy, overripe banana soaked in turpentine. Some people love it and find its taste to be something like fruity caramel and its smell, while still pretty rotten, delightful because of the fruit it signifies. These people are crazy. In Chinese culinary tradition, there are "hot" foods and "cold" foods, and this does not refer to the temperature at which they are served. They're more like yin and ... read more

We arrived in Kunming on the train after a long trip that was eased by movies and time to catch up on blogs and KFC for dinner hehe much better to eat cold kfc than train food I vote! So after the spectacular scenery that we had seen last night had almost disappeared now we are travelling through villages with some rice terraces that are not very green still beautiful though and especially seeing people working in them! We have left Chengdu wondering if we had prioritised the wrong way as we have not had a chance to see some amazing things there as we had such a short amount of time and same with the next stop we were wishing that we had put aside time to go to Dali and Lijang however we have ... read more

It was a dark and stormy night... Okay, okay, it was actually neither dark nor stormy, but it sure felt that way, given that I had locked myself out of my apartment on the eve of my departure for Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. With that fiasco out of the way, I felt certain that my five-day respite in the City of Eternal Spring would be just that. And, for once, I was right. I left on a Tuesday evening, flying into the tropical capital at 10:30 at night. Gazing down at the twinkling lights below the wing of the plane as we began our descent, I noted the clarity and sharpness of the architecture laid out below me. Oh, right. This is what a city looks like when not viewed through a perpetual layer ... read more

This last week, with Tom's parents visiting, we got a chance to get to some of the actual tourist sites around town, something we normally wouldn't make time for. They got out to some places like Lijiang and Dali, but I'm tied down with my school schedule, so I was only able to make it for some of the day trips. Normally, I'm not the kind to get very excited about temples in China. Most of the Buddhist temples I've visited seem pretty much alike, and Taoist temples are just hard to come by. When in Beijing, we lived just a few blocks from the largest Taoist monastery in China, and one trip there was all I really needed, even though we ran past it nearly every day. I'm glad I ventured out to Bamboo Temple, ... read more

Sometimes I have a feeling China is not a country but a totally different world. It's a country full of DRASTIC contrasts. Fascinating but at the same time scary. A country where the poverty borders on splendor, backwardness on the newest technology, slowness of vilages on speed of big agglomerations, gray traditional Chinese homes on the rainbow of colors of the shopping centers, help and the warm hearts of the Chinese on their lack of respect to the foreigners. It's a mix of cultures, religions, traditions, ways of thinking... It's amazing that in a country that probably has the biggest technology progress, people (still) believe in natural medicine, mix unknown to others herbs, believe in energy, calling ghosts out, predictions, lunar calendar... It's a country of unique and VERY diverse landscapes. The area where delight borders ... read more