The Bangkok Blog in Kunming, China

Day 1: Arrival

We arrived in Kunming, China at about 12:00pm.  The flight from Bangkok took 2 hours.  We were picked up at the airport which is huge, but empty. This big building phenomena seems to be typical in many Chinese cities.  Governments and developers construct huge projects that are way oversized, I guess hoping that, to coin a phrase, if you build it they will come. It doesn’t always work out that way.  But maybe this airport will be different, as the city is growing very rapidly.

The weather was cool and crisp.  Kunming is reputed to be the cleanest city in China. The weather here is generally really nice, year round.  The air was fresh and on the drive to the city it was obvious that this is a very green city.  Before starting a tour of some potential sites for various projects that we are considering, we stopped off at a restaurant, The Brothers Jiang, which is very famous in Kunming. It serves a local specialty which is a double soup dish.  The first bowl of soup, an appetizer, is very small and is basically filled with herbs.  The second bowl is enormous and filled with lots of meats, vegetables and flowers.  It was really good but impossible to finish given the size of the bowl.

We then started touring some sites, including a 130 year old building that we are considering turning into a exhibition space for new geriatric care processes in China.

It will be trick to get a lot of time to work on entries during this visit as each day seems to be packed with scheduled visits and requirements.  I will do my best.

So far it seems like Kunming is a clean and well managed city.  There are bike lanes everywhere and almost all scooters and motorcycles are electric.  But it’s not a small city, by any means.  There are almost 7 million people living here.  However, with no heavy industry and a central government decree that it should be the garden city of China, Kunming has a lot going for it.  It’s also the hub city that connects Southeast Asia and the rest of China.  This has allowed Kunming to become a tourist location for people from places like Thailand and Singapore as well as visitors from other parts of China.  With a new high speed train line to Shanghai that just opened and another one being built connecting Kunming to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, the future of this city is in pretty good shape.

I will try to add entries each day that provide a view into this city.  For now, it’s off to more meetings.  By the way, the final photo in the slide deck above is the view from my hotel room.  It’s pretty nice.