User profile: Alien

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Looks, Money, Status

The house and the baby are particularly important to fiancee's parents, the car less so unless the fiancee is big about considering herself middle class or maybe upper middle class. Seems to me the (present, anyway) job may be slightly less important than in the US.

Just my impression.

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Forums > Travel Yunnan > KMG to Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City

If you can change your dates, the weather is pretty good in November in Hanoi, and again maybe April I'm told, but it's lousy at most times. Hanoi is a beautiful and interesting city with too many cars and motorcycles on rather narrow streets. You might take a look at Jim Goodman's Uniquely Vietnamese - as well as at his other 2-3 books on Viet Nam, to learn just how Viet Nam is NOT just like China, to which the culture and society are always being compared.

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Voltaire's guess is a good one. Note that few Chinese get shot and few Lao shoot at them. I'm not advocating gunfire, but most poor are used to being poor, and I don't think this is good - but individuals losing their cool and blasting away is unlikely to solve anything.

I think museum displays of dinosaurs almost everywhere are partly built of real petrified bones and partly by artificial parts made according to what is known about the type of dinosaur in the display from remains found elsewhere. However, I know nothing of the specific displays under discussion.

Good article! I visited the place (Dhaka and a couple villages in the beautiful green poverty-stricken countryside), in 1985, and now it sounds even crazier than what I saw at the time - and I was coming from Calcutta by land, so I was already a bit acclimatized to South Asia. Calcutta is amazing and also crazy, but looking back on my experience there from Dhaka,m it seemed like a beacon of hope, sanity and development, compared to the sadness and desperation of Bangla Desh.

Too many people, incredibly fertile farmland with no possibility of developing any more because it's all already under excellent labor-intensive cultivation, corrupt ruling class, and further problems - hopefully, we both simply missed seeing whatever causes for optimism may exist somewhere. Been a lot of places, but Bangla Desh is the only place that made me, literally, cry. I read a lot about the country while I was there (nearly 3 months), and the more I read the more depressed I got. Supposedly the economy is better now than it was then...??

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.