I have never seen an accident with a bus that I could clearly blame on the bus driver - bus drivers seem to be pretty good, and cabbies aren't bad, it's the private car drivers who cause the problems, and one reason is that most of them haven't been driving for very long. But yeah, there's little respect for, and little enforcement of, traffic regulations, which seem to be taken as suggestions rather than rules. However, I would rather put up with this behavior than with foreigners (read: westerners, for the most part) who go around being self-righteous. Right: the traffic could be better, but obsessing about it and getting all moralistic/legalistic about it is a sure path to the creation of a much more unpleasant social atmosphere.

@HF Campo: yeah, maybe it's dead now, check pulse.

I'm already depressed by air pollution when I see it - don't drive, or take taxis unless you need them.
Altitude of Kunming and Dali is about the same as that of Denver or Kabul, a bit more than half that of Lhasa. I don't know what this has to do with anything. However, it's possible to die from sudden arrival in Lhasa without acclimatization (airplanes, the train), though of course very few people do. Effect of altitude on the body works like this: the difference between sea level and, say, 1000 feet, is less than the difference between, say, 1000 and 2000 feet, or 6000 and 7000 feet - it affects the body along a rising curve, up to around 17,000 feet or so, after which the body can adjust temporarily (for a few months, but there begins to be a downhill slope around this altitude), if acclimatization is intelligently gradual (if not done you're taking a very serious risk) - but the human body cannot adjust permanently to altitudes higher than that, and there are no permanent human communities above that approximate altitude. I don't think altitude-caused depression in Kunming is anything to worry about, except perhaps for a very few individuals who have some particular physiological problem with it (acclimatization is weird - there are 25-year-olds who find it difficult and 60-year-olds who have little trouble). I haven't met anyone who's moved here from lower altitudes with such problems here, as far as they & I know - a good percentage of the population have moved here from lower altitudes, and it shouldn't have anything to do with being a foreigner. Speaking personally, I find this altitude makes me feel good (I'm over 60, but I acclimatized pretty well when I was in my early 20s too, although I grew up at 500 feet) - 6000 feet isn't really much.

Persian (Irani) cuisine includes rice with butter, good flat bread; no pork. It is not spicy.

Lot of bad driving in Kunming, it's not racist to point this out. Best to take the bus, bicycle or the metro, or walk. One good thing is that there is not much fast driving in Kunming, cf. the US, much of Europe, Thailand and many other places.
I guess what is meant by Kunming being a 'rural city' is that there are a lot of people moving to Kunming, and to other towns and cities, from the countryside.