Step 31 - Kunming Events! Kunming... parents? Damn, no decent titles here either.

Alright, reporting live from Lijiang here, but I'm actually going to write about events in Kunming. Maybe even Dali! Since my memory is a little hazy, I'm going to run through these places out of chronological order. It won't really make a big difference. *edit - As it happens, I actually did write about them in chronological order. Word.*

The place I probably have the least to write about is Green Lake Park. It's located fairly close to Yunnan University, though as mentioned before, somewhat average directions made finding things a lot more difficult. Still, we had a map, we could have just looked at that first... A stitch in time saves nine and whatnot. Anyway, my views on GLP? It's alright, nothing spectacular though. Gosia had made it out to be an epic wonderous place of magic where unicorns graze calmly on rich green fields and rainbows fill the sky. Maybe even it rains chocolate, I forget what she says occasionally. *ANYWHO*, it's basically a small island surrounded by a lake, pretty sure it's man-made. On this island there's a small forest?/bunch of trees, and buildings. See, this is where things get tricky/debatable. Seeing as the island looked so lame, Byron and I didn't actually venture onto it. We'd walked the entire way around the island in like 15 minutes and were getting blasted by music coming from the island most of the way - It looked like there was a wedding happening there. The music was actually kind of funny - Chinese electro-pop and then Christmas carols came on... for a wedding? But still, there were lots of people in black suits, and what appeared to be a bride, soooooo... yeah. Anyway, at hearing we didn't go onto the island Gosia felt suddenly vindicated. If we hadn't been on the island, we clearly hadn't had the full experience. Maybe so, at that current time, I felt pretty good about avoiding the hordes of people dancing to questionable music. I still feel good about it.

Alright, next location, The Temple Of Which I Cannot Remember The Name. It's located pretty close to GLP, so following a quite average fried-rice lunch, we continued on our walk. Directions would prove quite crucial in this segment of our journey. As it turned out, Gosia had marked the wrong place on the map. Kunming's streets were a bit of trouble navigating, so Byron and I spent... maybe an hour or two wandering around. I would like to make the point (whether you choose to believe it or not is up to you!) that I was entirely okay with wandering randomly through the streets - as Byron's semi-guide here, I've felt that I ought to let/make him see some of the crappier parts of China. Luckily I don't have to try too hard, these things present themselves all the time. Back on topic, we eventually reached the marked location. Hmm, a government building, with armed guards posted at the entrance gate. Possibly a military building. After an entertaining conversation with the guards, with such phrases as 'Where are we?' and 'Can we look around' followed with 'Here' and 'lol, no', we continued on our way in what we decided was the best path to what looked like the place we were *actually* supposed to go.

Turned out we were right, so we paid the 6 kuai entry fee and wandered in. Initial impressions? 'Hmm, quite a bit of renovations going on here...' We basically wandered through a construction site, to arrive to the main part of the temple, which has a large moat/pond/pool?, filled with fish and turtles. Oh, my bad. Turns out the pool was getting a do-over as well, as it was drained with the mud getting pumped out. What wasn't getting pumped out? The variety of dead/dieing aquatic creatures that littered the bottom of the pool. Nice. Especially at what I believe is a Buddhist temple? Ah well. The actual temple itself was much like every other I've seen, and Byron didn't seem particularly impressed so we moved on. Again, I can imagine this one is probably better under nicer circumstances.

Next on the list, Byron and I took a half-day trip up the Bamboo Temple. This was one that Gosia had strongly advised against, but we'd decided that it sounded pretty good and we had the time to do it, so we'd just take the risk. Turned out to be the best thing we did in Kunming. We took a cab up into the hills which took around... 30 minutes? It provided some sketchy views of the city, but was relatively interesting as it showed probably the poorest parts of Kunming that I saw. The Bamboo Temple is, unsurprisingly, located in/around a whole bunch of bamboo, or what I like to call, a bamboo forest. There wasn't anything particularly amazing about the temple itself, or the model Buddha inside. There were a lot, but the Lonely Planet seemed to be talking about a different place when it said you could find models of disciples? riding various mounts through the surf (we did see exactly this sight in Dali, so... a mistake of theirs? Or did we just not explore fully enough?). I guess I just liked this place because it was calm, it was peaceful and the weather was warm and sunny with a light breeze. Basically, it was a really nice time to be there.

Finally, the Stone Forest. This one we attended with Gosia, and had a fairly entertaining day. Again Lonely Planet failed us with false information on getting there, but we ended up organising and haggling our way there on a mini-bus. The SF is basically just a big park full of interestingly formed rocks, some quite tall and imposing while others are just basically boulders/pinnacle-shaped rocks. It's entertaining enough to walk around though, exploring the various nooks and crannies which are actually quite small at times. See my facebook pictures to get a better understanding of what I'm waffling on about right now. There isn't much more to say about the SF, but I can talk about the trip back into Kunming. As it happens, for some reason the minibus was also stopping off at a coffee & flower market/building. They asked if we were cool with that and we figured there wasn't any harm. The only harm done was to our wallets. Seriously, this place was jam-packed with delicious little sweets and coffee tastings. I ended up buying some Pu'er tea (not coffee, I know.), coconut flavoured toffee/sweets (OM NOM NOM), and some random waffle thing. I'm yet to open the waffle thing, but Byron has been sharing his coffee-flavoured waffles and they're pretty nice. My passage through the flower market was quite brief, as I have no need of them... but they did look and smell nice, at least. Maybe I mis-spoke there. Flowers are awesome, but I had no current application for them in my travelling situation! Yeeaaaaaah.

Anyway, that's about all I have to comment on for now, I think. I'll get into Dali and Lijiang soon enough, but I will say for now that I think Dali is much more awesome than Lijiang. Dinner soon. I've been eating well everywhere we go... also spending too much O.O

Oh, side note. It appears that music purchased off iTunes can only actually be downloaded once. WHAT DA FRUCK? Seriously, this is nuts. I formatted and now I can't download purchased music again. Now, I'm not entirely as pissed as I might have been because the music if backed up elsewhere, but just the concept that I should have to pay again. I've bought it, I should be able to download it a million or two billion times should I want. In my opinion anyway. God-damn you Apple, god-damn you Steve Jobs. Yet another reason I'll avoid them both as much as possible in future.