Forums > Living in Kunming > Going home: wait for the new airport to open? I've read the new airport will open soon. I'm due to go home in July. Should I wait until the airport opens before I buy my ticket home, in the hope that there are direct connections with Europe? Or is it safer to bet on a flight over Beijing to Belgium first?
Or: when airports open, do they typically already have agreements with major flight organisations ready so I can fly the very day it opens?
Forums > Food & Drink > Vietnamese food That looks good. You have tried them, I take it? I'll give it a shot this or next week.
Forums > Food & Drink > Vietnamese food I recently heard that Kunming counts over 10,000 Vietnamese nationals. Why oh why isn't there a single Vietnamese restaurant (run by Vietnamese and true to the Vietnamese kitchen) to be found in Kunming?
I'm seriously craving some Pho, Nems, Com Rang and Ca Phe Da. There is a place near Baita Lu on Dongfeng Xiang that does good rice flour wraps but they're not what they were in VN.
Vintage Cafe has real VN coffee but they are not able to serve it iced. There seems to be more to it than just adding ice bits.
Forums > Living in Kunming > Laowai in Beijing trys to rape girl... I read somewhere the man paid for sex and was subsequently set up. There, another spoke to the rumor mill and another incentive to shut up until you know what exactly happened.
On another note: racism is innate, natural and there is nothing wrong with it as long as you do not disadvantage the other person. In the west we have become obsessed with (being against) racism, this does not seem to be such an issue in China.
Live and let live and do justice to those who deserve it.
Forums > Living in Kunming > Computer games Maybe an odd question. I used to be a devout gamer but have since had better things to do and not been in possession of a computer that can handle high-end games. However, recently my old love flared up again and I've been dying to play some of my favourites: Team Fortress 2, Civilisation, Starcraft 2 ...
I have a very portable Thinkpad X200 which is unfortunately not powerful enough to meet today's games' graphics demands.
Now I don't want to spend a couple of thousand on a laptop that can handle those games. It's way too casual to justify such expenses.
Neither do I want to go to internet cafés here because I don't feel at ease when the time and the money are ticking away. Moreover, most of those cafés don't accept foreigners, the games are in chinese, and the settings are not customised to my needs.
I've tried OnLive, a service that streams games over the internet to your PC. It means you can play any game without having special hardware. That worked fine in Belgium over a 20Mbit connection but the 4Mbit connections in China are lacking and the GFW probably puts in its share of the lag too.
Does anyone know of a service like OnLive or any other way to casually play some high-end games?
Kunming residents rally against chemical plant
发布者it's not as much about PX as about the quality standard of the plant. China is notorious for corner-cutting resulting in rattling structures. You don't want a rattling chemical plant in your back yard.
Kunming residents rally against chemical plant
发布者Ian: yes it needs a phase to improve. And protests are inherent parts of governmental development. It's impossible for every person to know all the details of everything. People have work and family to care about. But other decisions are nonetheless impacting their lives. That is why people that have time and capacity to think will think for them. That's how it's always been.
Kunming residents rally against chemical plant
发布者Ian, you have a point in your first post. But in any country's protests, there is always a majority that does not exactly know what they are demonstrating against. Just as people voting Obama don't necessarily know his entire program. What matters is that, if a select group is able to understand the problem (from what little information leaks out), they can convince a larger group to fight for their cause. Much like politicians and parties in the West do. We call it democracy. So by those (our) standards, China possesses some sort of democracy.
Also, you don't see any foreigners complaining the lack of democracy in this country. They are complaining about the dirty tricks the government is playing to keep people from voicing their opinions: threatening to fire and imprison, that's just blackmail.
Finally, it's not entirely right to say that there is no democracy in China. According to a Chinese friend of mine, there is something called a 听证会 (tingzhenghui), a public hearing, where larger projects are submitted to a public vote. Some of the anger in this case is that there was no such hearing about the building of this plant.
From the banners, it looks that Kunmingers mostly care about health and blue skies, an easy life with enough to survive on. As more and more people reach that level where they have enough to survive comfortably, more and more people are going to stand up against things that impact their quality of life.
But, as someone put it: "I care about this city, I have family here. But we are all happily driving some 300,000 cars inside this city- and no-one is protesting that." Very good point.
Yuxi-Mengzi: China's newest railway
发布者Great news- by the way: the Kunming to Yuxi stretch takes 1h50m and costs Y28 (hard seat).
Kunming battling Chinglish
发布者Jeremy; same problem. If they had any clue, they'd have chosen another font.