Learning Mongolian gaoxing? I also didn't hang out at Salvadors too much, but I didn't find anyone snooty there, well not any more snooty than sitting in a nice cafe in the West.
Anything in Mongolia that is interesting? I thought about biking through there at one point, those massive wide open plains.
@JanJal - you probably can. But we don't want to risk that you cannot or that someone in the airline you board in the foreign country (Chinese airline) says "you cannot board the plane, because you cannot legally enter Hong Kong" even if you are in transit only. Or some official in Hong Kong doesn't quite know the rules (or is being obtuse).
As Tiger says - never assume. I think we will keep avoiding Hong Kong until all PRC citizens have free entry.
We are living outside China now. When we return to visit we actively have to avoid Hong Kong as the Chinese Embassy in our country apparently cannot process a Hong Kong entry visa for Chinese citizens from outside the main cities. So it doesn't get any better if you try to visit Hong Kong from overseas.
Ha haaa, great comment. Particularly ugly or plain apartments are now to be referred to as "sky turds". That is 95% of the ones you see when you look around.
Pretty easy way to test if this is a genuine Chinese person or not - ask them to start replying to questions in Chinese. Then get your wife/friend to read it to see if it makes sense.
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So fast, so convenient. One star off for opening before the train station stop is connected!
Wow, just wow. Possibly the best Chinese food I have had in Kunming. And in one of the nicest, traditional courtyard style restaurant I have been in. A woman dressed in traditional qi pao playing a gu zheng just adds to it.
We had okra, mushroom soup, dried beef and chou dofu. All top notch with the bill coming in at just over 250 kuai. But we could have fed 3 people for that so not too bad at about 80-90 kuai each. Not the cheapest but for the quality, it's damn good.
If you have people visiting and want to take them to a traditional Chinese style restaurant with Yunnan style food, or want a romantic night out with a gal, you can't go wrong here. Close to Green Lake (down a little alley) for a romantic walk... Just perfect.
Pretty good place for getting all your documents translated and/or notarised. Note that there are a number of notaries in the building which you can find by going up the stairs (the elevators are impossible). But you have to find the stairs to do so... go in the door, head over to the right, go up the big wide stairs which head up a floor, turn right then right again into the elevator area and right again into the stairwells. Whew!
One point off for the elevators never being available and having to hike 7-9 flights of stairs (not good if you have to go 3-4 times a day like I often did!)
This does not stop at the Jinanya hotel at Da Shang Hui as the flyers state (and is on the images tab here). They need to have another stop in the same area or else they are missing out on covering a big chunk of the city.
You can take another bus, the 919C, I believe, if you are nearby Da Shang Hui, which leaves from the bus station on HeHong Lu, nearby the Qianxing road intersection. This bus goes every hour and is white, found at the western end of the station. It is operated by a different company and takes about 1 hour 10 minutes to get to the airport due to a large number of stops especially near the airport.
Great bus though if you can catch it!
Friendly people, even got to the talk to the vice consulate, who told me she had done a stint in Malaysia's Siberian Consulate!
English is spoken by some of the Chinese girls working at the desk who are pleasant to deal with. I assume they do Visa's as well but I wasn't here for a visa, this time!
Kunming subway train derails, killing one
Posted byI think we would be upset if something disastrous didn't happen! Wonder if you could make a business selling subway survival suits... some sort of step into suit with tonnes of pillows sewn to the outside and a huge helmet. The suit could be strapped to the inside of the train in case of sudden changes in speed as a result of derailment!
Kunming subway train derails, killing one
Posted bySomeone should do a video on the extreme sport of riding subways in China. "At anytime, this train could jump off the tracks, or a support column could collapse, or a parking building could fall down... this is dofu dregg construction... this is EXTREME SUBWAY RIDING"... and then just be sitting on the subway, looking worried. You could string it together with heaps of radical camera movements and some slowed down footage of stepping onto the train.
Whose game to ride the subway in the first 6 months?
Kunming new home sales plunge
Posted byOh yeah, check out this world map affordability index:
www.numbeo.com/property-investment/gmaps_rankings.jsp?year=2012
Kunming new home sales plunge
Posted byI can't find any decent info on Kunming regarding house prices, but we could definitely guesstimate a little.
Current house prices come in about 8600-9500 per msq. Average house size, say 2 bedrooms would be around 60 sqm = 516K-570K kuai.
Average salary is around 2500 kuai a month = 32,500 kuai a year (assuming 13 months, common to be paid an extra month for chun jie). Median multiple ration approx 16:1 - internationally still unaffordable. Remember that historically, until recently, the international median multiple ratio was 3:1!
How close am I?
Kunming new home sales plunge
Posted bytallamerican touches on the things that I am talking about.
The banks in America were doing some rather disturbing lending, lending over up to or over 100% of property values based on the idea that property values would always rise. I know because I worked with the heads of lending for a bank in NZ - they would often go to big conferences and hear what others were doing. These banks were delusional about house prices, believing they would always rise is failing to see that real estate is simply another capitalist based market, which means it will work in boom/bust cycles, the magnitude of the cycles usually being decided by speculators.
China is in a situation now where its economy is growing and has been for a good long while now. Their economic growth has resulted in massive infrastructure and housing development. But the market is now both saturated with new houses and suffering from a lack of real buyers - people that will live in and own the house. It is being driven by speculation from rich people who own many houses as investments, most of them have the same belief that real estate prices will only ever go one way, partly because for the past 20-40 years thats what it has done. At the same time Chinese growth is slowing, while still outstripping the west by a long way, a large chunk of the growth comes from one market - real estate. Add to this Chinas rising personal credit and you have potential for house price catastrophe.
The prices also speak for themselves. The median multiple ratio in China is beginning to be rather ridiculous (this measure median income to median property value). In my country, this is over 8:1 (8 times the median income to get the median house price) which is considered "unaffordable". In many Chinese cities this ratio is 20+:1, ridiculously unaffordable. In a place like Singapore or HK this is OK due to extremely limited land and such high demand for it, but in a place like Kunming... that sort of ratio will guarantee one thing - empty buildings.
This from the guy that predicted the housing market collapse in the US and the recession:
"No country can be productive enough to reinvest 50% of GDP in new capital stock without eventually facing immense overcapacity and a staggering non-performing loan problem. China is rife with overinvestment in physical capital, infrastructure and property. To a visitor, this is evident in sleek but empty airports and bullet trains, highways to nowhere, thousands of colossal new central and provincial government buildings, ghost towns and brand new aluminium smelters kept closed to prevent global prices from plunging."
At the same time though I completely agree with Danmairen:
"...predicting what's going to happen in China it's a bit like putting on a blindfold, aim, and hope the dart ends up somewhere in the general direction of the board"