We started our adventure in China in the Yunnan province, in southern China. We didn’t really know where to begin in such a large country, and Kunming was the biggest city near-ish to where we were in Thailand, so we figured, what the hey, let’s give it a try. We chose it before doing much research on the city, but the more we read about Kunming and the Yunnan province, the more excited we got. We read that it was an area of China with lots of natural beauty, historical cultural areas, and great food. We were not disappointed. 

Our flight from Thailand left super early, and we got to the airport in Bangkok much later than we usually want to arrive for an international flight, but we made it on the flight without having to check our bags – a treat because we were flying with Air Asia, an airline known for nickel-and-dimeing their customers on every little thing. We got to Kunming a little before noon, and were amazed that the temperature outside was a mere 75ish degrees! It was glorious! We finally got away from the heat!!! We left the rather nice Kunming airport on an airport shuttle and made our way to our hostel.

We had a nice private room in the hostel, Cloudland, which was a great way for us to get our bearings in China. We had our own space to relax, but also had the common areas to talk to other travelers and swap advice. We took a nap before heading out to explore the city. 

We had some trouble finding somewhere to eat that first night. We headed to a restaurant that seemed to have good reviews online, but when we got there, there was a wedding or some sort of large event going on so we couldn’t get in. We had passed another small place twice on the way to and from that restaurant, that looked busy, but when we decided to walk back there a third time it looked like it was just chicken feet and rice, and we didn’t think we were ready for that yet. We tried to go to a soup restaurant, but the system for ordering and getting your food looked really confusing and no one spoke any English or was willing to help us get fed. So we looked at the map, found a place marked “cultural food” on the map, and decided to give it a shot. It turned out to be a beautiful restaurant near the flower and bird market, and was perfect for our first Chinese dinner!

It turned out to be called Laofangzi. The staff didn’t speak English, but the menu had pictures, and we waited for a bit for a table so we had a chance to see what everyone else was eating. We chose something on a foil hot plate of sorts, because a ton of people were eating it, and also some sort of meat dish. We had no idea what they were when we ordered them, but they looked good. 

The first one on the foil dish turned out to be ‘rice cake’, these thicker rice noodles of sorts that were cur into smallish squares, cooked with mushrooms and God only knows what – they were amazing. I wish I could eat these more often but I have no idea what the Chinese name of the dish is or what was in it!

The second one was some sort of spicy beef cooked with Sichuan peppers and a few other things, also quite yummy but fairly oily. The first dish came out way before the second, and we were getting full by the time the meat came out, so we took most of it back to the hostel. As we were packing it up, we discovered that there were greens under the meat too! We had no idea until we were too full haha.

We had a lazy morning the next morning. It was so nice to wake up late and not have to rush out before the day got too hot. We had breakfast at the hostel, where I got nearly a gallon of ‘pork bone soup’ with noodles, pickled veggies of some kind (one I want to say was pickled celery?) and cabbage for breakfast. Thom had some sort of oatmeal platter. We lingered in the breakfast area for a long time, slowly eating the soup while some older people were playing mahjong outside the window, with traditional Chinese music playing in the background.. It was a lovely moment to experience together. 

We eventually decided we couldn’t sit in the hostel all day, so we found a fellow traveler and walked to the flower and bird market. It was pretty cool, they had SO MANY succulents for sale! And even some weird ones we have never seen! I had to be reminded a number of times that we couldn’t bring them home

As per the name, they also had birds for sale. Not a ton, but the ones they had were pretty cool, they were singing like crazy!

There were also a bunch of souvenirs for sale, and I bought myself a few new Chinese paintbrushes for when I get back to my pottery making 🙂 Afterwards, we wandered around the city for awhile until we got tired of walking. We found a small park with lots of older people playing chess and mahjong, and also a monument of sorts with a nice flower display.

That evening, we decided to try to find the dish we were supposed to eat in Kunming, Cross the Bridge Soup. The story goes, that a woman’s husband was working as a professor a distance away from their home, and the woman would bring him lunch every day. But by the time she got over the bridge to where he was working, the soup would be cold and the ingredients overcooked. So she created this dish, where the soup had a layer of oil on top to keep the broth hot, and the ingredients would be added right before eating so they would be fresh. That way, when she got the dish over the bridge to her husband, he could assemble his lunch and it would taste good, hot, and fresh. 

So we read about this dish, and learned that you have to assemble it yourself – put the egg in first, then the meat, then the veggies and noodles, so everything will be finished cooking at the same time. We thought we had it down, but didn’t realize how hard it would be to order. 

We got to the restaurant, Brothers Jiang, which had the name of the restaurant and the dish on the sign in English, so we thought this would be a good sign – that it wouldn’t be too hard to order. But when we walked in, no one came over to seat us, and it seemed like the weird soup place we had thought about going to the previous night. We went outside the restaurant and pretended to be on our phones so we could watch and see how other people got food. There was more than one ordering counter, a number of counters inside that both patrons and servers kept going up to, and we had no idea what we were supposed to do to get soup. We eventually figured that we had to go to one certain counter to order. There were some pictures, so we just tried to keep it simple and ordered one #2 and one #3. We paid, were given a receipt, and waved into the restaurant where we found a table. 

At this point, it got sort of weird. One person took our receipt and disappeared. Then a number of other workers tried to come to our table and figure out what we ordered, but the receipt was gone. One kindly wrote out what she wanted us to answer, but it was in Mandarin characters, which was no help to us. We tried to each hold up a number, Thom had #2 and I had #3, but this proved to be more confusing. Eventually, food was brought to our table, and they brought us a million ingredients, which seemed like way more than we ordered. Then they tried to bring us three bowls of broth – each one probably a gallon – and we realized they thought we ordered three soups, because we held up a #2 and #3, even through we were just trying to show what we ordered. We ended up successfully sending back one bowl of broth, but they kept trying to push the other ingredients on us, and not a single worker in this restaurant with 20+ workers was willing to try to speak English to us (we can’t imagine that not a single one of the many young workers working there didn’t even know hello or soup in the soup restaurant.. But maybe they were just scared to say the wrong words? Or that we would make them look stupid? Not sure what was going on there). In the end we ate well, our soup was overloaded with great meats and veggies, and they didn’t try to make us pay more since our receipt disappeared and no one knew what we ordered anyways. The pic below is before we got three bowls of noodles and another plate of veggies and meat to add to the soup!

We spent out last day in Kunming wandering around Greenlake – just like our Greenlake in Seattle, it is a reasonable size to walk around and gets packed with people walking and hanging out on a nice day. In the middle there was a bunch of walkways and a fish pond, and a number of people dancing and having a good time. 

We found probably the best noodles ever at a small Muslim shop on one of the side streets by our hostel. They were making the noodles fresh to order in the front of the shop, and they were just perfect. Fresh, springy, and just amazing, topped with beef and veggies, and the one on the left also had a bunch of potatoes. The broth in the picture was also ridiculously good, spiced with some sort of Indian spices and just so flavorful, we couldn’t get enough even though it was a small free appetizer.

The next day we took the bus to the train station for our ride to Dali, a smaller artistic town sandwiched between a large lake and some tall mountains!