A Short Letter Home: One more day

Monday, October 09, 2006

One more day

Flashback: Monday, October 2nd, 2006
(You may suspect that I'm milking this trip for all it's worth. That I could have easily summed this up in one post instead of three.)(You're right. Deal with it.) On Monday, we had a chance to look forward to some socialization. Some co-workers who are teaching in Macau were coming up to Yunnan for the holiday. They were going to arrive early in the afternoon and spend the day in Kunming. Our boss was planning to show them the Bird and Flower Market and then take them to dinner, and we were invited to tag along. Ga Dai had wanted to hit the B&FM anyway, to buy a wall scroll, so we agreed.

We finished school in the morning (oh, that we had such motivation every day!), had lunch and then headed on down to the market. We weren't there for more than a half an hour before we met our compatriots. We exchanged greetings and browsed around a bit. The Macau crew were planning on heading to Lijiang on Wednesday, so they didn't go too hog wild in buying souvenirs. They soon saw everything they wanted to see in the market building and wanted to roam the area a bit. Ga Dai had her heart set on seeing more of the indoor market, so we split up and planned to rendezvous for supper later.

After Ga Dai got in her shopping fix, we headed northward, strolling through what I'm told is the oldest section of Kunming. It had a number of old buildings, complete with grass growing tile roofs and, incongruously, a large variety of shops devoted to video game equipment. Now that the family agenda had been fulfilled, I was looking to do my own shopping. In my haste to pack, I had neglected to include the USB cable I needed to transfer pix from my camera to my laptop. Since the date of our return was still up in the air and my camera was filling up, I figured it might be prudent to at least price the cost of another cable. The one drawback was that the family was getting tired and wasn't up to spending the next hour or so walking around on a quest. Fortunately we were coming up to Renmin Lu and a big plaza with plenty of planters to sit upon. I bade farewell to my dear wife and children and went out in quest of the technology I needed.

The quest failed, alas. Or maybe that's a good thing, since I didn't really need the cable. Either way, I had stopped in a computer store, appliance store and camera store. None of them had any sort of cables or even all those little attachments and doodads that seem quite abundant in the States. My guess is that since all these consumer goods are a relatively new phenomenon here, the market is really looking for brand new systems, not replacement parts for their existing systems. Anyway, my search took about 45 minutes to an hour. I then hooked up with my clan and we hopped a taxi to the neighborhood where we planned to dine.

We met up with our compatriots and discovered that there was no seats available in the restaurant. (I bet somebody had the audacity to get married that day.) Our boss then opted for another place, a mere two blocks from where we had been previously. Ah, well. Apparently the place was rather unique thing in Kunming--a building that was over a hundred years old! There were signs forbidding photography and everything. We had a nice dinner, comparing notes with the Macau crew and all that. (Turns out that they've never eaten bugs. And here I thought Macau was so cosmopolitan.) After dinner we strolled a bit in Green Lake Park. Finally, we all headed "home"--the Macau crew to rest and us to check the e-mail and make a decision about ending our sojourn.

We got back to the office and checked our e-mail. No word from any of our friends. Either this bird flu thing was really a non-event or they were all deathly ill and couldn't e-mail. We assumed the former and checked with a co-worker in Hong Kong. She had conferred with a friend in the prefecture and, in her opinion, returning to our city was not a risky venture. She did advise us to avoid un- or under-cooked poultry, though. So, even though we had had a nice evening out, we decided that barring an order to stay put from the States, we would head back the following afternoon. The wait was all but over.