Admire you for venturing into a land now more & more unknown - not Laos, but the land of no @##%& cellphones, wechats etc. - there's reality down beneath there somewhere, keep on digging!

@ dolphin: what's' your implied objection?

@ tiger: 'people in the music scene' - yes, I agree, would be a good addition - but then many of such may have problems thanks to what they have to do to be musicians here while simultaneously maintaining visa status. Wish immigration policy would change to enable.
@ agree with cloudtrapezer - I wouldn't go as far as 'stuffy', and definitely not creepy, but lighten and liven it up sounds right. Personally I have no interest in the Sofitel etc. tendency - though I'm not suggesting that gokunming has bought into all that. I am suggesting that they shouldn't.

I like the surreal, wide-angle photo of the old Workers' Cultural Palace, nice photo - but it obscures the friendly funkiness of the place as it was in, say, 2003 when I first went there and I'm sorry it no longer exists, There were things about the atmosphere around it which pointed up, at least to me, that, despite plenty of negative things that one can think of that characterized former ideas of social engineering, that there were some good things about it too that are now gone. I'm referring, mostly, to the down-to-earth everyday ordinary humanity of the place as it was. Time marches on etc., but things get lost and sometimes babies are thrown out with the bath water. A lot of the recently-imposed slickness is, in my opinion, negative. Not in political terms, perhaps, but in social terms, the old Worker's Cultural Palace had a real feeling of social equality and fraternity about it that we could use more of now.

Thanks, bilingual, that is really far out! I've read a bit about this, thanks to a former student's study paper. I'm currently proposing, in a work of fiction, that, if & when the human species destroys itself, it could be the mycelia that develop consciousness and spread it throughout the universe.