Kunming

A bit of travel arrangements in the a.m. to get our bus tickets to Dali and a day trip to the Stone Forest. Based on the recommendation of the Dutch guy at Wei’s, we fortunately found a little Chinese spitfire- running her own travel business. Chen was about 4’10”, but a bundle of energy.
Successfully having arranged our way out of town (our first step upon arrival in any town), we headed to Green Lake (Cuihu) a pretty little lake and park filled with Chinese people enjoying the day.
Kunming is called the City of Eternal Spring- and the weather was spectacular. Pleasantly warm and sunny every day- with no need for A/C. What a wonderful change from the sweatboxes of the north
From the lake, we took a taxi to the bird market and wandered through what’s left of the old city. Even the 400-year-old Nancheng Mosque was ripped down in 1997 to put up the most god-awful looking mosque. It had the look of a Las Vegas Casino.
As we walked, John spotted what appeared to be a revolving restaurant and we headed for the top of a local Chinese hotel. We found an empty restaurant with a lone waitress who figured out “cold beer” and started up the revolver for us. We had our own personal 360 of Kunming.
Like all other Chinese cities, a look around finds tons of office and hotel towers, either recently built or under construction. We took out binoculars to look into some of the completed buildings, only to find them completely empty. Meanwhile, the old parts of the city were being bulldozed to make way for additional offices and hotels. They are trashing their own past.
From our vantage point, we saw yet another revolver and decided to check it out on our way back to the hotel. It was in a 5 star hotel and we were, once again, the first guests. We had a sparkly waitress anxious to practice her English, so we got a bottle of wine and once again, John convinced them to start the revolver. We only had about an hour before the entire place filled with Chinese families. We ordered a few things to eat (most of the menu items were intestines and other disgusting parts of animals).
We raced home in a pouring rainstorm. At least it got the urine off our shoes after our train ride.