Are there any websites like gokunming, but more welcoming to non-English speakers by including other languages? Or maybe say some websites like gokunming but are in Korean or Japanese?

Take your time finding an apartment. Try to find a place that's near a a a main road if you plan to travel by bus frequently. There are frequent traffic jams on the smaller streets.

Make friends with as many students as you can. If you plan to learn Chinese a language exchange with students will be much more useful compared to most Chinese classes offered by schools here. Plus they will be a wealth of information for shopping and eating...hehe

Find students from all over the country, "standard beijing" mandarin is far from standard throughout the country... personally I've only found it useful in Beijing... heh. Most younger people can understand standard beijing mandarin, but most people won't normally use it... especially outside of northeast China.

Try not to judge things for the first six months or so... that means staying away from foreigners who sit in bars and complain about how awful things are here, find a happy bar, haha. Spend time(even if it means skipping class) visiting the hometowns of students, and going on short trips to villages with friends.

If you don't like spicey food there is plenty of non-spicey food to be found in small restaurants. They may not look clean, but the big restaurants aren't much cleaner in the kitchens either. I've also found the small places are much more flexible in ordering the food the way you like it.

I don't have any information either, but you may want to consider they also have a sketchy www.mindsabroad.com website also. My best guess is they are nothing more than an agent that finds foreigners for schools and other programs.

A little searching shows that the minds abroad program has supposedly been established since 2006 and has "the lowest prices period", but their prices are actually on the high side.

But also keep in mind that most Kunming websites are severely lacking, and never updated...

I'm not sure what style of lock you have, but I'm about to get a new lock put in... but it's just the part where the key goes in, it's not the whole handle and all.. I'm told it should cost around 100 yuan for someone to do it. To buy the part online is something like 50 - 80 yuan.

I also plan on studying there. Which campus do you plan on going to? e-mail me at zanthrick@hotmail.com