China - behind the bamboo curtain

We are now in China - a world away again from sleepy Laos. It has been a serious culture shock to move from a place where the streets look like this (below is the Lao equivalent of a major State Highway in NZ - not joking):

to this (the view from the Kunming railway station down one of Kunming's main streets): It's not only the streets that are different. I have so far been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that everywhere else so far, using two words of the relevant language then moving onto English has worked. Not so in China. In fact China has its own form of English which makes things even more interesting sometimes:

We are busy collecting lots of examples of this and will try to include them in future blogs.

Now for the drug bust ... we were happily(?) squished into some Asian-person sized sleeper seats on another one of many 9 hour bus rides last week when the police boarded our bus and - 30 long minutes later - one of our fellow passengers was posing for photos over his sleeper bed with handcuffs and some little red packets of powder that had been travelling under his mattress. Shaun, who was sleeping next to the haul, reported that the police had 'very nice cameras'. I was too busy admiring the prisoner's new orange jumpsuit. We have had no further run-ins with the law so far but it is still early days.

At the moment we are still travelling north and we are currently in the mountains of Yunnan heading for Chengdu in Sichuan. Unfortunately since we arrived in China we have been having some trouble viewing and accessing this blog (or anyone's blog -3 guesses as to why) so our posts may be a bit patchy but we will post what we can as we go.

M