Kunming

The flight to Kunming was tolerable, except that our chairs couldn't recline and the food tasted like rubber and that halfway through Indiana Jones our computer decided to take a nap because it can't last longer than an hour on the lowest brightness setting.  We seemed to be carrying some "Portable Bad Weather in a Can" because it was raining in Kunming too.  

Our hotel was actually an apartment building that was being rented out as an hotel.  The designers or the room apparently thought it would be a good idea if they used glass instead of concrete as a wall for the shower.  That's when we thought of a new phrase: "It's China."  Things in China don't always make sense, such as a bootleg DVD store (my favorite one) next to a police station.  So if someone asks about how they can get away with that, we just answer, "It's China."  We have now officially adopted those words as our official catch-phrase.  

After we got settled down in our apartment/hotel room, Peter just could not resist the temptation of 1 dollar DVDs (at my favorite DVD store).  We went on a shopping spree and have accumulated: the complete seasons of Lost, all the episodes of Seinfeld, every James Bond movie, and a DVD titled, "20 of the Best War Movies Ever Made."  I think that's enough for around 3 years (give or take a few months).  

After being back in the fresh air of Yunnan, I started to feel better despite the rain.  Kunming is a big city, but with significantly less people and pollution then Beijing.  It still has its fair share of traffic though (I hate traffic), so I was thrilled to finally go back to our house in (traffic-less) Xizhou.