User profile: Alien

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Living in Dianchi Road or KIA/Guandu neighborhoods

30kgs, huh?
You're right about the need to manage traffic, but it's only necessary because there's so much of it.
Public transport was far better 8 years ago, when it had less competition - the relative improvement you notice has only occurred over the period of the last few weeks.

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Forums > Food & Drink > McDonald's

Amazing, and very sad, that foreigners would come all the way to China & then devote so many pages to analyzing the local McDonalds. Is this or is this not evidence of a rather peculiarly narrow focus of interest, about food at the very least? Please excuse me if I suggest it might well imply a dishearteningly narrow interest in other things as well...like, perhaps, the world?

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Living in Dianchi Road or KIA/Guandu neighborhoods

@tiger: Maybe, about born-again & evangelism, I'm not sure. Yes, there's frequently god talk at other tables, doesn't bother me. The folks who run the place, and I think own it (not sure about the ownership - it was set up by Canadian Christians over 10 years ago, though I think most or all of the ownership is now in the hands of the Chinese Christians who manage it) are pleasant folks, friendly, good-humored, I always chat with them briefly in Chinese, never get religiously leaned on at all. Foreign Christians there don't focus on me either, in fact rarely talk to me (though they're polite & pleasant enough when they do), no doubt they would if I appeared at one of the 2(?) Protestant English-language church services in Kunming.
They employ physically challenged people as well as others, who seem cheerful about their jobs, call me by a nickname, people who otherwise would have a tough time getting hired for ordinary work (i.e., not the bloody Dwarf Empire) in Kunming.
It's a western-style restaurant, I find the food better than that of most Chinese-run western-style restaurants. Is this 'cultural colonialism'??

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Living in Dianchi Road or KIA/Guandu neighborhoods

@Bucko: 'need to have a car', 'have to make a metro run' - I take it you're serious. Doubtless all those other people clogging the roads with their cars and polluting the air are serious too.
Right, it's your choice, which you're free to make thanks to your income - but look at what you're saying.
So much for public transportation, including new-improved public transportation, solving the blight of automobile traffic.

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Tell it to Steven Hawking. A person's physical stature does not limit his/her potential for work that does not rely on his/her physical stature (e.g., English teaching, as well as physics). The cultural attitude that those who are discriminated against because they do not fit the culturally desired norm should be outcast or should be provided for by special environments that can be sold as entertainment venues to those who will not deal with their own prejudices is a cultural attitude that perpetuates discrimination against all who are 'different'. The problem here, as elsewhere, is a matter of dehumanizing those who are 'different' - prejudicial culture that regiments anything that deviates from its standards, rather than dealing with the prejudice itself. Why not have a theme park within which 'foreigners', with all their funny habits, can be kept, so that they do not disturb the 'normality' of cultural prejudices? Actually, there could be many: one for 'black people', one for Tibetans, one for Japanese, one for gay people, one for Han Chinese people who have given up their 'traditional' clothing for 'western-style' clothing (e.g., the great majority of Chinese, over the past century or so) - in fact we could subdivide and subdivide until nothing was left but mutual nonrecognition. All these would help to maintain the narrow identities of 'normality' that can be relied upon to advance support the cultural attitudes that promote the continuing inability of people to recognize each other as human, and to celebrate and accept their differences - not as entertainment items, no matter how 'cute', but as full human beings. How different is all this from apartheid?

This effort to maintain prejudice can, of course, be profitable to those who invest in it, and convenient for social engineers and political elites who want to maintain an elite power status by reliance on it.

The place is an insult to our common humanity and a spotlight on cultural attitudes of exclusion. Those who find that they enjoy such displays should take a good look at the nature of the culture that has formed them so narrowly. Cultures change; cultures have always changed; cultures are presently changing and will continue to do so; there is nothing sacred about cultural attitudes. Our common humanity is an ongoing project, and those who imagine they are not part of such a project are simply contributing their own blindness to it, and limiting themselves in the process. It's not the 'dwarves' who are the problem, its the people who will not accept them as within the boundaries of 'us'.

See John Israel's EXCELLENT book on the history of the university:

Israel, John. Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998

Books about universities do not normally strike me as exciting, but this one is.

John has lived in Kunming for several months per year over the past 10 years or more.

Modern nationalism is a manipulative ideology to manage global capital, and nationalist blindness to actual human beings leads to the punishment of innocents. China is not a communist country. People who murder in Pakistan cannot be extradited to China to be judged for murders of people in Pakistan, even if they're Chinese.

Reviews

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Not quite what you'd call a jumping place, but not bad at all for rather standard US-type meals, not overly expensive, and with a really good salad bar that's cheap, or free with most dinner dishes after 5:30PM. You can get a bottle of beer or even wine if you really want to, but I've never seen anybody do it - maybe that's just to take out. Chinese Christian run, and they hire people with physical disadvantages, who are pleasant and helpful. Frequented by foreign (mostly North American) Christians and Chinese Christians - was started by a Canadian couple associated with Bless China (previously, Project Grace), who are no longer here, but no religious pressure or any of that. Steaks are nothing special, and I avoid the Korean dishes, which I've had a few times but which did not impress me.

As a shop and bakery, it's very good bread at reasonable prices, of various kinds (Y18 for a good multigrain loaf that certainly weighs well over a pound. Other stuff too, like granola and oatmeal that is local, as well as imported things, including American cornflakes and so forth, which some people seem to require.

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Large portions, seriously so with the pizza, which is Brooklyn/American style, I guess. Convivial, conversational, good place to drink with good folks on both sides of the bar, especially after about 9PM.

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Really good pizza and steaks. The wine machine fuddles me when I'm a bit fuddled, & seems unnecessary. Good folks on both sides of the bar.