I lived there for a while. What's noteworthy about the place:

Very marked seasons. Summer is much hotter and more humid than Kunming. Winter is freezing, but it's tolerable. The heat seemed to come on everywhere at some predetermiend date, and it couldn't be adjusted in buildings. It just came on one November day and went off some time in March. In between, the furnaces made it so hot inside we sometimes opened our windows to the winter air just to keep it comfortable inside.

The city is very hilly. There were very few cyclists on the roads, and the bike lanes were paltry by Chinese metropolis standards.

People were quite nice and civilized. I hesitate to write this, but from my observation it's a stereotype rooted in reality. Compared to Kunming, the traffic was much more orderly, there was less spitting and shouting, and in general people seemed more conscious of public space.

Many places in the city smelled like rotting fish—because many places in the city quite literally were covered in rotting fish. Seafood vendors set up shop on any sidewalk and restaurants threw out their garbage with a mind to convenience rather than sanitation.

Very few beaches had public access. They were among the stinkiest places in the city, so most of them you wouldn't want to walk on anyway. There were some nice beaches but they were gated and expensive to enter.

The local accent is very pleasant. This is subjective, but I really enjoyed the locals speaking more or less the same dialect as the people on my Putonghua tapes.

Does anyone know a dentist that will see toddler-age kids? I called Huiying to ask if I can bring my 3 year-old for a cleaning and got a reply that amounted to "maybe but probably not."

I've just been told by my school's admin department that I and the rest of the foreign teaching staff at our school need to register with a new program of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs. The program has the inspired title "Evaluation System for Foreign Language Expert," and it requires users to submit their passport number and then, according to the homepage, complete a "resume, written test, and an online interview."

Here's the link:
evaluation.chinajob.com/IntlHR/login.php

Should we foreigners understand this program to be no more invasive than registering with our local paichusuo when we change apartments? Or should we be concerned about divulging all of this info to a bureaucratic agency charged with "evaluating the candidate's basic information and his/her abilities to become a successful professional worker in China"? Also, are your bosses making you do this too?

Haven't seen tempeh, but there's a great shop here that sells all sorts of meat analogues: face the entrance of Yuan Tong temple and walk right about 100 meters. ... They also have disgusting non-alcoholic beer, but don't hold it against them.

I'm a foreigner and my wife is a Chinese citizen. We're thinking about having a second child in China. Our first child was born here in Kunming and now has a US passport, though she hasn't left the country yet.

Would the One-Child Policy apply to us? Various government and hospital authorities have given us different answers, ranging from "It's no problem; have eight kids if you want" to "You'll be fined 350,000 RMB."

Reportedly there are three points where the fine, if applicable, could be incurred:

1. Getting the "Birth Education Certificate." We've been told with some assurance that we could bypass this step for the second child, as we already have the certificate. I'm skeptical though because it explicitly states that my wife has authorization to give birth to (only) her first child.

2. Getting the birth certificate from the hospital. Presumably their computer records would reveal the existence of our first child. I doubt this could be circumvented by giving birth at a different hospital.

3. Leaving the country. Assuming we make it this far, the customs official would notice that our kids' US passports had no entry visas, and could probably deduce that they must've both been born in China. Would (s)he then decide to play Batman and lay down the law?

Does anyone have any experience with this?