The "Spring City" - Downtown Kunming is excruciating boring - malls around "People's Road" and a big "government square" - same old, same old... but the neighborhood around the university and Green Lake Park is a really nice hangout-spot; an eclectic mix of boutiques, pottery, tea and upscale liquor stores (the latter mostly selling Mao Tai, the most famous bai jiu, which supposedly can be good if you spend about twice as much as for a nice single Malt Whiskey) as well as cheap student eateries, bars and cafe's. Actually, I'd go as far as saying that I have never seen such a concentration of bars and cafe's anywhere in China. And the best thing? Some of them are really good! There's a French cafe with irresistible chocolate and raspberry tarts and their home-made bread beats the German bakery in Nanjing by far! Another cafe sells Illy coffee and Belgian beer (Rochefort!) - how to choose? 
But no, the really best part is that these places are not just frequented by tourists (we seem to be the only ones) or expats (occasional sightings) but by the locals, many seem to be students. It doesn't feel like in Nanjing, where bars either seem to cater to Westerners or appear to be an attempt to copy something Western just to be fashionable. The people here make these places their own, i.e. they usually come out to play cards (Mahjong and chess are not really popular with the young crowd, that's something for granny in the park's tea house).
The most popular game by far is San Guo Sha (The Three Kingdoms, based on one of The Four Chinese Classics), which B. already acquired :) We just have to figure out how to play it. But supposedly it's sort of a mock off of a game called "Bang," which some expats tried to play with Chinese friends and they ended up changing the game to a Chinese context and supposedly it's much more fun than the original. I wonder if this is also popular with the overseas Chinese crowd?Kunming is rather small for a provincial government seat (1-3 Mio), and there's fairly little construction going on. Of course, there is some, otherwise it wouldn't be China, but the maddening rage of tearing everything down and building 40 storey apartment bunkers has not reach this place yet. As a result (and probably also due to the altitude and winds) the sky is clear - really, bright blue clear, in the midst of a city in China! Incredible! Of course, it's rainy season now, so the last two days when we had planned to visit some places outside of Kunming, it rained. Before that we had taken turns being sick, so we never made it far. One day it rained so bad, we stayed in our tiny hotel room playing Zak McKracken until the hunger drove us out in the afternoon.
Noteworthy food: Over-the-bridge noodles. The story goes that a wife who had to bring her husband lunch to his study retreat on an island (over the bridge), always had the problem that the food wasn't fresh anymore when she got there. On day she discovered that if the soup she cooked had a layer of oil on top, the soup could still be boiling hot even if removed from the fire. So, she'd carry this soup to her husband and add the raw ingredients by the time she got there - they would still be cooked but not be over-cooked. So, in restaurants you get an earthenware pot with soup, a sizzling layer of oil on top, and you are served raw ingredients that always include pork (in thin slices), egg (we had quail egg), noodles and greens (scallions), and you can order mushrooms and other stuff on top. Then you place all ingredients quickly in your broth and play with your food! Quite nice and tasty, but they should cut down the MSG in the soup.
And of course, Kunming has temples and other visit-worth stuff, but I won't bore you with that. One place we were utterly disappointed by is the LOFT, supposedly a factory district turned art gallery (like "798" in Beijing), but it was really lame. Most places were closed and the few paintings we saw were anything but avantgarde.Albeit being pretty far south, Kunming doesn't feel very tropical, because it's not hot and humid, it's very pleasant actually (probably between 25 and 30 during the day, but not really cold like in the mountains at night). It's almost 2,000m high. You do find banana and other tropical trees and the food has a little South-East Asian influence (for exampel lime and chili in the usual wood ear mushroom salad), but we're off to Thailand to see what the real South-East Asia is like :)
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