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Published: November 6th 2007
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Kunming may well be called the City of Eternal Spring, a title that we'd had no quibble with back in May, but the couple of weeks we spent there this time around were more marked by decidedly non-springlike rain, grey skies, and cold temperatures. Apart from the fact that it had been one of the more pleasant Chinese cities we'd visited, it was also a hub for flights to Myanmar as well as having plentiful connections to Shanghai, so was ideally placed to enable us to get to our intended destinations when we each went our separate ways. We'd both been feeling a little travel-weary, and a fortnight of relaxation and research appealed enormously.
We ate many of our meals at a cafe called Salvador's near the university, one of a selection of Western-themed eateries (and, in my opinion, the best) that offered us much-missed foreign food, e.g. burritos. It also appeared to be the meeting place of choice for the local expat community, both students and workers, and we saw the same faces over and over again. I know from my own short expat existence in Japan that when you're in an alien culture you may end up spending
a lot of time with people you wouldn't give the time of day to at home, simply because you feel a closer affinity to them than to any of the locals, and I can imagine it must be even worse for foreigners living in Kunming, with the main expat areas sitting distantly on the east coast and Chinese society less Western than Japanese society is.
With LA Woman's impending trip to Myanmar requiring the acquisition of $100 bills satisfying certain criteria (not creased, ripped, or dog-eared, not older than a certain year, with serial numbers not beginning in certain characters, etc), several visits were required to banks, during which we saw the electronic note-counting machines that each teller is equipped with (needed when, say, a woman wants to withdraw 1 million yuan which she then stuffs in her handbag), as well as the grading keypad on which you punch a button to indicate your level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the teller.
We were also reminded of the occasional powers of invisibility that foreigners can demonstrate in China - walk down the street and you will be stared at and usually avoided by passers-by, but stand in a queue and
you physically cease to exist as far as subsequent queue-joiners are concerned.
The end of our stay in Kunming brought a divergence of our travelling paths, no small event given that the last 6 months had been spent together almost 24/7. Though there's an intention to meet up for further travel early next year, it was with a miserable sense of loss that I waved off a Mandalay-bound LA Woman at Kunming airport. Dining alone that evening made me self-conscious, and I sought refuge in a location popular the world over with single guys at a loose end - an Internet cafe (of course). And preparations began for the final leg of this year's travels.
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bill
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thank you to john and LA woman
hi john, just want to thank you for such a great blog. i started reading from the very beginning, from your trip to india onwards. just love your photos, your dry humour, and the way you interact with other travellers and locals, great stuff! from reading your entries, it seems you've found a "soulmate" in the form of "LA woman", i really hope you meet up with her again real soon. i wish you guys all the best in the future! i just hope you keep on blogging! take care, bill.