November 2: Green Lake

As this week in Kunming is relaxed week, today was spent touring the neighborhood around my hostel. My hostel is located just one street away from the famous green lake. At about 11, I headed out with my roommate, a girl in her thirties who has been growing up in Kunming and thus is familiar with the place. She started her own business selling premium tea leaves and thus has some time on her hands lately. She had intended to ask her friends to help her take some photographs for her tea packages and I offered to help take it for her today since I had nothing much on anyways.

We went past Green Lake to Yunnan University where we took a walk around the area. The university is an electic mix of old and modern architecture and the autumn foliage gave the place a warm and cosy feeling. There was a slight drizzle so it was not as easy navigating through the university as expected. We left via another gate and found ourselves at the famous Wenhua Street, which is a popular hangout spot for young people since it is filled with eateries, cafes and shops catering to the tastes of the students from the nearby university. We then headed to one of the restaurants nearby for lunch and to my friend's surprise, I had been to another outlet of the same chain of restaurant just yesterday! Lunch at Hong Dou Lou was fuss free and soon we were on our way.

We took a long walk around Green Lake and since it's the onset of winter, there were many seagulls around. We also popped by the Yunnan Military School Museum where I had an hour long summary of the history of Yunnan and its military stories. It was indeed an eye opener and I learnt much about the famous soldiers in the history of Yunnan that contributed to its success.

After the trip to the museum, we headed back to the hostel and rested a while. I then spent the evening playing pool at the lounge with some of the staff of the hostel.

At night, I headed out with the same roommate back to Wenhua Street as it has a night market there every night. It is not extremely big or noisy but there were quite a number of roadside stalls selling clothes, trinkets and street food. My plan was to have some western food but since the only places selling western food there were pubs, we settled for Korean bbq. The food was decent and quite a lot for the price even though I felt the meat was not as fresh as I hoped for. Unfortunately in China, quality meat is still something that is lacking. Even in decent restaurants, pork and beef can be of questionable quality. After dinner, a nice long walk was due in order to better digest the large amounts of meat consumed.