Report 10 - January 19, 2000 North of the city center there's a residential quarter named Jiang'an xiaoqu ("small quarter on the river's bank"), actually the place were most foreigners live. Most buildings (lou) have a water heating system running at solar energy, so when it is cloudy... no hot water. A group of buildings usually have a main gate which, for safety reasons, opens at 6 am and closes at 12 pm, preventing people from coming home late at night. Apart from this gate system, another way the Chinese defend themselves against robbery - though Kunming seems a very safe city to stay - are decorated iron bars which make buildings look like giant bird cages.

In the main street there are all the shops you could ask for, selling everything from old magazines, vcd's and casseroles, to pastry, dog meat (actually whole roasted dogs) and goat cheese. In the surrounding area there are at least two big markets selling old furnitures and the like: in one of these we could get an old washing-machine and three tables, and a boy with a three-wheeled bycicle brought it all up to the 5th floor... The plague of living among the Chinese is their karaoke-mania! Almost every afternoon, sometimes till late at night, many people amuse themselves with karaoke-singing, ranging from Beijing Opera to modern and trendy Chinese pop-singers. Everybody seems to be wild about it, both adults and children, and the reason could lay in the passionate love of this people to exhibit themselves in front of friends and relatives, apparently not bothered at all by the quality of the performance. Does anybody have the slightest idea of how an out-of-tune Beijing Opera singer sounds like?