Kunming and Holey Pants

last week, Martian and i made a really unexpected trip to Yunnan, China for easter weekend. one day he just asked me, ‘do you want to go somewhere really really cold?’ and i said yesyesyes with mucho excitement, and that was that. a few days later, we were freezing our butts off in the mountains of Ringha :\ ‘really really cold’ is a description of much deception.

on our way to Ringha, we transited for a night through Kunming, which is about an hour away from Ringha by flight. Kunming is the capital of Yunnan, situated on an elevated plateau, with a pleasant temperate climate all year round and like most of China, very rich in history.

it’s a lovely city with clear blue skies, crisp air and friendly rosy-cheeked locals. good smoky smells of street meat on skewers fill the air and one has to constantly avoid being run over by bicycles or gutsy ladies who try to cut your queue ;) kiasuness notwithstanding, the locals are very friendly even if a little bit shy at first.

we only got to explore Kunming for a day before we had to head to the airport at 5 in the morning the next day. so even though Kunming is home to the Stone Forest - what looks like a really magnificent cluster of sharp stone formations, about 90 kilometers away from the city and a UNESCO heritage site - we didn’t get to travel to the outskirts to marvel at ‘em rocks. we mostly stuck around the city drinking lots of this Chinese tea that Martian really likes - it’s called pu er - and poking around nooks and corners, all while trying to get by with our embarrassing grasp of the Chinese language. Martian is a lot better at it than me though. he conveyed to this one cabbie in marvelous Chinese, with perfect intonation and twist of the tongue, that we needed him to go a little faster because i, the girlfriend who needed the bathroom quite urgently, was very ‘beh tahan’. yah. i really love my boyfriend sometimes.

here are pictures from Kunming, and there are many, but regretfully they have to be kept to a minimum because my host is stingy with bandwidth and i am SWITCHING HOSTS SOON, so until then, it’s going to be less than 30 pictures per post :\ the cruelty.

#1 lots of people cycle in Kunming - university students, working men who wear their briefcases on their backs, mothers who carry their kids in a basket at the front of their bike.

#2 us stopping for lunch at a little noodle shop in Kunming. delicious stuff :) more on Kunming food in a new post.

#3 at the Flower and Bird Market, where there are lots of birds, fishes and other random pets being sold. give you 1 buck if you can guess what that red mess is in front of the lady :\ they were quite the bestseller, with lots of stalls proudly displaying them

#4 this woman just took the pot from the noodle shop we were at, scooped some water out of their tank, and washed her kids’ hands. then she nodded at the shop-owner, the shop-owner nodded back, and that was that. such neighbourliness! and such cute kids!

#5 Martian disturbing a kid who was having a lot of fun playing by himself on this statuary. it was quite an emotional one. in there is a statue of a man holding a gun and also a little girl close to his chest, and the little girl had bronze tears coming out of her bronze eyes

#6 birds at the Bird and Flower Market

#7 cross-stitching is like the fad with the girls manning the stalls at the market. everyone was doing it and totally ignoring customers like us who were interested in purchasing beetles and dwarf hamsters :\

#8 smartly-dressed man selling tempting-looking strawberries

#9 one of those old sewing machines, used by a tailor who operates her business right off the street. it was so cool. my grandmother used to have one of those; i grew up amongst the sounds of that foot-pedal being pushed back and forth and the rapid mechanical tak-tak-tak-tak of the machine pushing thread into cloth

#10 at crossroads

#11 walking to Cui Hu Park

#12 this is Cui Hu Park, a huge park in the middle of the city where locals retreat to for a quiet evening feeding birds or a round of tai chi in the mornings. lots of lovebirds on benches like that one. Martian and i felt so at home!

#13 before this day, i had NEVER seen one of those bags on sticks, except in cartoons and storybooks when i was little. yknow, the bag of stuff that characters take with them when they’re running away from a wicked stepmother or when the hunter needs to go out to the forest to chop firewood?? the Enid Blyton books used to call them knapsacks… are they really called knapsacks?

#14 cherry blossoms at the park

#15 me being bored while Martian pored over the history behind why Cui Hu Park attracts so many gulls and birds :P conversation: “wow baby this is so interesting!!!!!”; “yes baby can we go play with the ducks now”

#16 DUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *HAPPY

#17 me being very impressed by the baby watermelons and baby mangoes. they were SO SMALL! but tasted SO GOOD! we bought some back even though the fruit peddler ripped us off, as is always the case when it’s Martian on the buy-side. hehehehe *runs away

#18 this is Chinese Lee Meng… hahahahahaha

#19 men playing cards or a checkers-like game on the streets is a common sight. i suppose in a country where half of the Internet is blocked, one must turn to the cards for some honest entertainment :\

#20 us shopping at a little grocery store near the hotel. Martian bought these instant noodles that were really really good in the unrelenting cold of Ringha. it irritates me how he always successfully picks all the really nice food, and then he doesn’t let me forget it when i say i wanna have some. “oh, nowwwwwww you want some” -___-

after our Ringha trip, we came back to Kunming for a few hours to catch our flight back to KL. we mostly hung out at this flower market and some nearby streets:

#21 lots and lots and lots of baby’s breath at the flower market

#22 lilies. the flowers here are SO CHEAP. we once did this flower project for Valentines’ Day, and i remember how happy i was to find a supplier who sold us 24 stalks of roses for RM 18. yeah well here in Kunming it’s 24 stalks of roses for RM 5. *depressed*

#23 really big cacti

#24 a dragon flower arrangement on a hearse. it was interestingly morbid. morbidly interesting?

#25 streetside stall selling fishballs. i wanted to eat but Martian don’t let :(

#26 lots of snooker tables in the alleys of Kunming, where men gather around for a game and some smokes

#27 me posing in front of a place that looked so funnily gangster! all the people milling around it looked very gangsterly too. but they ungangsterly allowed lil ol me to mock them with a ladypose. actually i wasnt ladyposing… i was trying to look ruffian. see the imaginary cigarette? :\

#28 i leave you with a final picture of several kids playing by the road. note the little hoodied boy sandwiched on the kiddie-sized automobile - he had a big hole cut out in the seat of his pants. this seems to be a popular local fashion trend among the kids!!! and with such practicality too; instead of wasting the precious seconds it takes for the tyke to search for a bathroom and pull down his pants, all he has to do is squat by the side of the road, and voila! bowel movement at its most convenient! :D

i really liked Kunming. there’s not much to do there, really, but i’m beginning to realize that i have strange affinity towards cities that are covered with graffiti. it must be the vandal in me :D

pictures of Ringha soon :)

59 comments April 4th, 2008