synchronicities, failures, and travel fatigue

Today was hard. Last night Paul's hard drive completely died and he lost a lot of work and won't be able to work on the plane ride home, so he's pretty bummed. We tried to get out to see something and mostly failed. It got hot today too so that didn't help.

But first I wanted to show you the mobile police pods that are all over Kunming:

I think they are cute, and funny. There are cops all over town.

Next I wanted to show you some really yummy red merlot wine. It used to be that the only red wine you could get here (aside from expensive imported French stuff) was Great Wall wine. Now there are wineries everywhere including Shangrila (the mountain town that we visited). This wine is organic, very tasty, and comes in 850 ml bottles! We got this from the travel agency folks in Shangrila who took us out to a super yummy yak dinner. 

We ought to go see the Stone Forest, Kunming's premier attraction, but it is a 2 hour bus ride each way and we are touristed out. So we went to the central Flower and Bird Market today. It took a while to find it because its location is now a big hole that will soon contain a high rise. In fact there wasn't really much of a market there at all, just some stalls with old trinkets. We did see some colored chicks, though (not sure how they do this):

Leo had a bit of a meltdown around this time. We ducked into the ramen place that we ate at yesterday and had more Japanese food. Then we decided to take a double-decker bus around town since Leo had never been on the second floor of a double-decker. We got lucky and landed on a bus that was headed home. Unfortunately, we weren't really ready to go home and so hopped in a taxi. We decided to try out the Lonely Planet's recommended art district - "the Loft" which is supposed to be an unused warehouse district with art galleries and a Scandinavian restaurant. It took us a while to get there, because it was on the other side of town. It was in the middle of a construction zone. Leo melted down again. We found one art gallery with one exhibit which was bits of rolled up newspaper that was formed into large ropes and shapes. 

However, the gallery was holding a charity show tonight and we eventually found this poster:

 

These Boulder folks were in the Naxi village when we were there. We met the guy in front, who is the lead for the group and who lives in North Boulder and who had studied with the same Chinese profs that Minh had studied with at Columbia U. I had no idea they could sing and dance! They were supposed to be high school students who were in China for 6 weeks to learn Chinese. We didn't get to see it because we had to get dinner. The Scandinavian restaurant was no longer there. There were no other galleries. The outing was a big bust.

So we hopped in another taxi back to our home mall, which was nearly an hour back. I thought we might find some spicy Vietnamese soup there - Leo's favorite. But no, it turned out to be Chinese food at the Vietnamese restaurant. We went to the busiest restaurant in the mall, which had lots of yummy dim sum and stumbled back home.