Kunming 昆明 - part I

If you're interested in some general information and stats about Kunming, you can go ahead and look here.
To cover the basics for context, Kunming is the capital of Yunnan Province, has a population of 3-8 million (depends on definition and who you're asking), and is quite elevated at 1,900m - the last fact has helped get it its nickname "spring city".

Yunnan - the province - is the south-western-most province in China, bordering with Vietnam Laos and Burma, and further surrounded by Tibet, Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou and Guangxi.

As the capital city of Yunnan, you can find here people and food influenced by the surroundings and various ethnicities,mainly Hui (Muslims), Dai (Thai related) and Yi, but unfortunately, the Hui are not as connected to the Muslim Asians as those in  Xinjiang (the north-western-most Province), and there is a clear lack of Lamb meat dishes around.

Kunming at night

Kunming's elevation/ moderate weather/ "Spring city" status can remind one of Dublin in a few ways. For one, there is a relative lack of mosquitoes. This was quite a surprising finding, as some pre-reading suggested that mosquitoes are around as much as in any other place (minus Ireland), as did the nets on all the windows in my apartment.
OK, the nets on the windows, and the 24th floor dwelling may be of some influence, but I still found it surprising to have waited a whole week before getting beaten for the first time, including a couple of days in Jiang-Shui to the south - a city with a lot of water and rice paddies around it.

And there's the weather. Yes, it's August, and it can get at time pretty hot, but in this area, getting as hot as 30 degrees, is as good as it gets. The weather really does resemble Dublin - on an average day, you can go through the 4 seasons, from a strong rain to clear sunny skies, from chilly to hot. It's only about 5-10 degrees above the average temperatures in Dublin.

Taking the kids for some recreation in the city center

Kunming's main commercial street

The Game of the day in Kunming is playing Chicken with the cars/ buses/ taxis and the thousands of small electrical scooters on the streets. In most of the road you want to cross, you will not find proper traffic-lights, although the traffic is quite heavy, and the way to go is just go and hope for the best. None of the vehicles is taking much note of any of the traffic rules or signs anyway.
The way to go is jump in front of the cars, with the assumption that the cars will just decide to stop.

The traffic in Kunming brings us to an important observation (just before we can to some fun staff about clubs and drinking, so hang in there).

reminiscing on better days

The traffic is just a small example of what I see more and more to be the most fertile ground for Game-Theorists. Behavior of the Chinese seems to be as basically rationale (in a pure economic sense) as it gets, every behavior being cost-benefit based (on the personal level), driven strongly by considerations of gains and losses.
This means that China can be a great place to experiment and implement economic behavioral theories, a great place for government intervention mechanisms, Mechanism Design implementations, etc.

This also (probably) implies that old-school management techniques applying good-old stick-and-carrot probably work best here.

"Cheap talk" is at revealing itself here in full, and any verbal agreements between people here, are only held to the extent that those agreements work well for all parties later on.

I spent most of last week here with no light in the bathroom. On Friday, when my roommate (Zhang Laoshi, you remember him) finished partially repairing the pipe issue (don't ask), it turns out that on the way the light somehow stopped working. As I notified the American here (Jonathan), he said no problem, Zhang is heading anyway for some shopping today (Friday), so he'll buy a new light on the way.
On Saturday, I notified Jonathan again that I am still taking showers in the dump, and got the usual: "oh? But Zhang said he fixed it. I'll see to it, it will be fixed today. Sounds good."
On Sunday morning, I ran into Zhang in the apartment. He casually asked me about drinking together that evening. In return, I opted for losing face, and raised my voice a bit when asking him about the light in the bathroom. He said "I'm not sure there's a problem". ...
I ended up raising the tone a notch when asking him how can it take a whole week to change a bulb. This of course would not have had a particular influence other than where the conversation has started.
That evening we were sharing a couple of glasses of BaiJiu and MiJiu (52% and 25% local alcohols), enjoying the light coming out of the bathroom.

One of the few cities within the city - the East Pagoda

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