A friend and I decided to hell with the fact that Chinese Spring Festival is the worst time of year to travel, we passed around the lube, bent over and with big bearing grins prepared for the exorbitant pain prices that we would pay for airfare and to stay in hotels at this time of year.

Our sketchy travels plans were something to the order of: go down to Kunming in Yunnan provinces, get acquainted with the scene there, get some visas to enter the member in training of the axis of evil (Burma), fly up to the fabled Lijiang to experience more tourist stalls per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world, then fly back to Kunming and onwards to Rangoon.

Lots of trees and foliage lined the streets in Kunming making the city like a jungle…if you were to make the buildings, roads, people and cars magically disappear.

Kunming was an administration stop, because I like to do the planning for my vacations while I’m actually on vacation. It adds a certain sense of urgency, panic and stress that make the memories fonder. So while we were running around booking hotels, flights, and filling out the 20 odd forms you need to get into Burma, we only managed to grab a mere glimpse of Kunming. Like seeing a naked obese man roll around in jello, a glimpse was more than enough.

Kunming is a cold city. They call it the city of eternal spring, but I would say it’s more like the city of eternal stupidity for not installing a heating system anywhere when in January and February the temperature regularly hovers between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade. I know this is common in southern cities, but Kunming’s altitude of 2000 some odd meters exacerbates the problem. Not only do most places not have heating (hospitals, hotels, modern shopping centers, airports), but they actually open up all the doors and windows, like saying “hey, our balls aren’t quite shrunk enough, lets make them even smaller!” It wouldn’t have been so bad had I brought adequate clothing, but I was again fooled by the lies of weather reports, when I should have known that it’s always 5 degrees colder, sun means smog, clouds mean rain, and rain means volcanic firestorms of hell.

Kunming does have some nice things. For example, the bird market is a great place to buy birds, contract bird flu, or to get a shiny new bong. Yunnan is poor as shit (3rd poorest province in China), so most food is much cheaper than in the east coast cities. I was able to acquire a proper breakfast at not one, but TWO different cafes, which is an infinite multiple of the number of places where this is possible in Qingdao. Yunnan food in general is very spicy and it seems easier to get a greater variety of foods than in the Shandong. Also worth noting, the people here seemed to be more “arty” or whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. There were more punk/goth hairstyles and fashions and people seemed to be more willing to go against the grain of mainstream Chinese style, which for your information is pure blandness with cheap unnecessary frill.

The traffic situation reminds me of that scene in Terminator 2, where the machines napalm the entire city of LA and all the cars are just stuck with unconvincing looking skeletons inside them, blocking the roads and highways. Despite silent swarms of e-bikes nearly flying into you whenever you tried to cross the street, there were cars gridlocked to the point of making driving a car totally fucking retarded. There’s no subway, and of course buses got stuck in the jam too. Walk you say? We were on a strict budget of time, and laziness would not permit a deviation from that. Every taxi ride would take about 45 minutes even though we were going roughly 3 or 4 km. According to one enlightened taxi driver, this is because of the dearth of highways in Kunming, and that one of the two ring roads was completely shut down for renovations. He also claimed that Kunming has the highest car per capita ratio of any city in China.

Before leaving Kunming, we figured it would be best if we picked up some anti-malarial medicine for the trip to Burma. While I seriously doubted it would come into use, being the dry season and lack of mosquitoes, common sense said it was better to be safe, then to get really sick, die and wind up as a ghost haunting the set of some campy Thai daytime soap opera. Funny thing those Kunming hospitals, because none of them seemed to know what malaria was! The one doctor, who had heard of it at some point in med school, directed us to the center of disease control of Kunming. Once there we were told to go to the 8th floor, where one of the doctors who wasn’t hard at work cooking instant noodles finding a cure for AIDS, told us the obvious, they didn’t have any there, maybe we should try the airport. The airport!? The airports here can barely serve up what some might call food, yet alone a series of meds that would protect one against a harmful virus! Giving up hope, we decided to say no to drugs and hope that the malarial mosquitoes were busy with other people…like certain individuals in Kunming.

Our time in Kunming quickly and thankfully came to a close, and it was on to the ancient Lijiang for old buildings, naxi food, things blowing up, and tigers leaping gorges in no particular order.

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There were alot of these old school styled tea shops selling…tea all packaged weird in traditional style bags. Yunnan coffee was despite its growing popularity, much harder to find.

The bird market!! :

Among the treasures we found in the bird market was this Rubik’s cube for people who are angry at Micheal Phelps, and a store that he might enjoy:

Lotus bulbs

For some reason the fruit was all hideous looking, I mean, look at those shriveled oranges, and look at those…uhh…things:

And I really miss the clouds. Not to say there isn’t beautiful clouds in China. I’m sure there are. I’m also sure that place isn’t Qingdao. Here the sky comes in three varieties: blue, smog, and overcast. The last two being pretty much the same thing. So while I was in Canada, I tried to take as many pictures of the sky as I could. This post is the culmination of that effort.

Good news is that once the swamp-ass summer is over, the weather here dries up quick and remains so until spring. Maybe the smog will clear enough that we’ll get some cirrus, stratus or altocumulus undulatus up in this bitch. And maybe I’ll grow a tail….which come to think of it…

Well, it’s 20 degrees out. So I guess that’s not so bad.

Funny thing that smog. Around these parts people call it 雾气 (wùqì), meaning fog or mist. The correct word for smog is 烟雾 (yānwù) but I haven’t heard it used. I’m certain that most people know the difference, and aren’t so ignorant to actually think that what’s going on out there is some fine misty goodness from mother nature. I hope.

Instead of whining about it, and how the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the climate change/global warming/global shmobal, here’s 10 reasons why it’s awesome.

• You don’t need to smoke cigarettes here. Just breath the air. The mélange of fumes gives you a different flavour depending on whether you near the chlorine processing plant or the coal power station. Think of all the money you’ll save. Ok I realize people here smoke like fiends anyways. Maybe the smog was the gateway drug.

• It adds another great meteorological excuse to the perpetually late employee’s arsenal. “Hey gimme a break boss, I couldn’t see where the hell I was!”

• Athletes can train here to really put their lungs through hell, then when they actually compete in places like Vancouver or Boston where the air is better, they’ll be unstoppable superhumans.

• If you do enough physical activity outside, you damn well might get high.

• It acts as a literal shroud of war should a foreign army be so foolish as to invade.

• There’s a remote possibility that all the chemicals in there air may provide humans with some beneficial evolutionary mutations.

• It provides a good starting point for future colonization on Venus, seeing as the place has an atmosphere of sulfuric acid.

• Screw beer goggles; with enough smog everyone starts to look good! (*although this still won’t clear you of the dread when you wake up next to a hideous abomination).

• You never have to worry about your kids’ looking up at the sun, and staring at it in a mesmerized state to the point where they go blind, ‘cause it isn’t there.

• If you’re asthmatic or into world of warcraft, it’s a great reason to never have to go outside.

• Because you won’t be able to dry your clothes outside without them becoming dirty, you will have a good argument for buying a proper drying machine, using up more electricty, and contributing more to the wonderful smog!

To be honest this kinda thing doesn’t worry me. I went out biking today and did my usual mount Fushan climb. And let me tell you what that takes:

Guts Chocolate Bar.

This is what the local forecast is for this week.

And this is what will actually happen, based on my supreme knowledge of complicated weather phenomena, telekinesis, and what it’s been like for the past month.