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Forums > Living in Kunming > Finding a mountain bike on a budget

I suppose the two big questions are, what are you going to do with it and what is your budget?

Will it be mostly commuting, or road riding, with some soft-roading? Will it be riding around in the hills on dirt tracks? Will there be furious downhill riding?

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Forums > Study > Where to study in Yunnan

The main names you see you here are Keats, Huayang, and another I can't recall. They are all much of a muchness. Remember that they all pretty much have the same business model, and they all compete with each other, so that their prices and class sizes will be similar. If you have already studied Chinese you will probably have a preference for teaching style. It might be worth explaining your ideal, or what you prefer not to have, then you may get information from a recent student.

One other thing to consider is cost of living, and style of living. It helps if you can rent somewhere convenient to the school at an affordable price.

Dali Vs Kunming is a wider question. One key thing to consider is that Dali no longer has much of the quiet mountain city vibe. It is now a quaint but fully blown tourist

town. With all of the modern trappings of bijou stores and even some high end retail. Lots of crowds all year round. You are more likely to locals see you as a tourist (cash cow) than a novelty (also can get annoying).

Kunming is much more of a modern city and has become more international in the years I have been here. It is a bit like Shanghai was 15 years ago.

One final note, this has been discussed a lot on this site over the last few years. A search would help a lot. The search engine on this site is not ideal, try a google search using the following text
site:gokunming.com subject
The subject being your search term, e.g. 'huayang'

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I have noticed a lot more 'black' cabs where I live. One advantage of the little guy now owning a car. They will negotiate, some are greedy just find the next one. They actually line up like a taxi rank where I live.

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I agree that the problem is related to the moving away from the Paleao diet. The big shift seems to be more meat (they love high fat cuts), more oil, more noodles, and perhaps more than anything more rice.
Western fast foods, do not exist in my wife's hometown, diabetes, is a major problem there too. The people are also more active than I see in Kuming. The key change in their life has been more affluence.

The population is eating a lot more food generally than they did before. Blaming obesity on western fast food is easy, but I am not sure there is solid causality. Western fast-foods arrived arrived at the same time as more affluence.

The affluence coincided with more processed foods (a western style diet, but not fast foods, or western corporations). Perhaps it would be fairer to call this a developed countries bad diet.

In the supermarket we can see how much store space is dedicated to high fat,high sugar, snacks. These are mostly home market products. Some of the local drinks are much more prevalent than Coke, and have more sugar in them. For the supermarket it is a no brainer what to give shelf space to, as these foods all have high profit margins.

Buying oil and meat used to be a luxury. Now everyone can afford much larger portions, and more frequent consumption of both. My mother in law will admit to consuming more meat in some meals now than she used to get in a month. In the past her main source of oil was rendered animal fats, vegetable oil was store bought and rare.

I see my kids in school. Half of them have parents who understand nutrition, and the kids are consuming a Paleo diet. The other half consume a lot of high carb snacks between meals and eat huge portions of rice and oily foods at the canteen. WangLaoJi is seen as a semi-medicinal stimulant.
Or could draw a correlation between student diet and performance, but that would be unreliable as the kids on a healthy diet have parents who seem to make better choices generally. The educational attitude may also reflect the family values.

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Yes, when I first came to China 10 years ago I would maybe see one morbidly obese person, usually a pre-teen, about once per month. Now I see many more daily, and I also see more morbidly obese adults. You can't blame this all on western fast food.
I will use about 5 ltr of oil per year, mostly for baking bread, and less than 1 ltr for frying food. I see a neighbor coming home from the supermarket with that much every week.
People also think Asians are skinny because they eat rice. But rice is a simple carb. Lots of rice leads to fat. Add to that all the oil and sugar.

As for sedentary life, it is a problem, but 11% of the popn. do not live a sedentary life.

Reviews

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A reasonable choice of lumber that has improved over time. Fancy hardwoods like walnut, and mahogany are in abundance. There are some plywood and rubber-wood boards available. There are also some kiln dried imported softwoods and merbao available. Some of the lumber is very green, so look for the kiln dried if you need stable timbers.

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Echo everything said by others.
Breakfast great and the serve from 8am. Most other places say 9am and they still are not ready.
Sandwiches are cheap 22-32, and really packed full of filling. We got some sandwiches for a day out, the only mistake I made was ordering two, as this was too much. These are seriously good sangars, and they are wrapped in alu foil.

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In fairness to Metro, they are a wholesalers, and not really a supermarket. Hence the need for a card, which can be got around.

They have improved in the year I have been away. They now carry a more consistent range of imported foodstuffs and they also seem to have sorted out the mported milk supply.

They have a wider range of electrical appliances now, there is a coice of more than one toast. There is also a better range of seasonal non foods, like clothes, shoes, garden furniture and camping gear.