Slice of Heaven. Best place to do some quiet study. It's non-smoking, they have a comfortable lounge, or a couple of tables if you prefer and they seem to have the fastest and most reliable wifi out of all the coffee shops/restaurants in Kunming. Also, their location means outside of peak times such as Friday evenings they don't have too many customers and the generous opening times mean you can come as early as mid-morning, or leave as late as midnight when they close.

The owner, Barbara is very friendly as are her other Chinese waitstaff. Compared to every other cafe/restaurant in Kunming, this is the only one where the owner actually greets everyone and makes them feel comfortable. Although the French Cafe and Salvador's offer reasonable food, their owners don't greet their guests (unless they know them personally) and with their large turnover of customers it's difficult to get any privacy either. As mentioned Salvador's doesn't even offer wifi so it's unsuitable as a comfy place to browse the web.

@Chicha78, why would the French Cafe overcharge "foreigners" when the place is foreign-owned? Absolutely ridiculous. Probably the staff made a mistake, I have been faced with many incompetent waitstaff at restaurants in China so this should not be surprising. In any case, you should always know how much you should be paying and if there is a discrepancy, you raise it directly with the waitstaff or the manager.

@tommann, I'm not sure that not following small rules is a good thing. It smacks of selfishness and a lack of rule of law. However, the good news is that slowly, but surely, China is changing and people are starting to obey even "small" rules. The thing is, as soon as you go abroad or even just to Hong Kong, SAR, even the smallest rules need to be followed and those Chinese not used to following such rules can be faced with some serious wake up calls when confronted.

@culture, I have only seen people smoke inside the airport toilets rather than inside the terminal itself. And like you, I was at the airport late, in my case to pick up a friend around midnight some two weeks ago now and fortunately, did not see a single smoker inside the terminal building (toilets excepted). Having said that, smoking should not be tolerated inside the toilets either.

I am going to make a guess that your other gripe about living here are the toilets? After smoking and bad driving by electric scooter riders, that would be my next one but I'll leave you to it as I'm not going to start a thread on the topic.

Everyone has the right to whine or at least to complain about something they feel is not right. Many Chinese do it, and I have seen many Chinese people here, particularly women, take offence at other's lighting up in their presence so clearly even locals can be assertive about this issue.

Personally I am not impressed by smoking being allowed inside cafes and restaurants, although at the ones where smoking is banned I find it is usually enforced. However, since smoking is still allowed in many other places and I am merely a customer, I don't have the power to tell others to stop smoking unless it was really in my face (in which case I would find another seat and move before I would complain about it), but in general I greatly limit my exposure to second hand smoke by frequenting non-smoking restaurants and cafes and when I do visit the ones where smoking is allowed, I limit the time I spend inside those places.

Bars are unfortunately the worst places to go to - I feel that after just one hour spent inside a bar here and the smoke almost causes you to have blocked arteries leading to a heart attack, lol. Even non-smoking bar owners are just as much at risk of major health problems if they spend every evening inside their bars.

Arguably even worse are some "tea bars", which serve tea to private guests in small, confined and poorly ventilated rooms sometimes have smoke so thick it looks like you are about to enter a gas chamber. I remember sitting inside such a tea bar with my company executives and a friend of mine last year and we were eager to leave as soon as the "pleasantries" were over and done with. I can assure you, it was anything but pleasant sitting inside a room full of yellowish haze caused by 3 chain smoking guys that probably went through a pack each within the 45 minutes we were there.

Smoking is not my only gripe here - the other one involves riders of electric scooters: Yesterday two idiots on an electric scooter were driving in the wrong direction on the footpath (sidewalk) on Renmin xi lu and nearly drove into me - I was not impressed and told them "xiaoxin!!" i.e. careful and they said "sorry" in English, which I was not expecting. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with being assertive, as opposed to aggressive. If you don't like something, you say something about it. Shutting up and not taking any action is stupid - say something, if you feel things are not going the way you want them to.

This was the third or fourth time in as many days that I have been confronted with idiotic scooter riders who were racing through red lights or not slowing down and nearly had a crash as a result - drivers of cars I can handle OK (I drive here too) but the way many scooter riders ride here is a public nuisance.