A soft landing (kind of)

Have to start with a small disclaimer - worry not (reading the title) that everything is 100% smooth and there's not really much to report in terms of mischief or trouble making.
Knowing that my 3 readers are into some China-bound action stories, be sure I'd find something to tell you, sitting next to a quiet pond on a lovely warm spring day in Canada.

To keep things short and sweet (per post, relatively speaking), I will just have to split into a few posts at one go, as it took me a while to sit myself down and start updating.

As far as what is ultimately supposed to be a backpack trip in rural China, this was as soft a landing as possible, I guess.
For one, I made it easily enough (along with my checked-in bag) all the way through to Kunming, despite of the tight transfers. This includes a 3-hour scheduled transfer in Shanghai - requiring an on-time landing, getting my luggage, clearing customs and immigration, commuting/ locating another terminal, and checking in for the local flight.
This was all done with 2 hours to spare somehow, only to find out last minute that I forgot my iPod on my Shanghai-bound flight. Not an enormous loss on its own, other than I will now be deprived of my music and Chinese listening-courses for the next 3 months - can be quite painful.

And so, I will have to rely on whatever means I will find along the way to help me pick up some Chinese. We'll get to that in notime.

As of the landing's softness, I had someone pick me up at Kunming's airport, and take me directly to my pre-designated apartment. Well, there you go ... not really the pre-designated apartment.

Airport pickup - the only non-Chinese

Although I was promised a fully-furnished apartment in a specific location, to be shared with other students of this so called "language school", they forgot to mention they had some logistical change-of-plans, and so relocated me to their "new apartment", which I am to share with one of the Chinese employees of the company - as it happens, the only one who does not speak any English other than "Long live Chairman Mao".

"New" in this case, refers mainly to the fact that they had no time to equip the apartment with a lot of the essentials, which they apparently plan to slowly add up, with me serving as a free consultant on what's missing - not a bad deal, only that my consultancy fee here is not too exciting. There's a whole kitchen that they proudly showed me when I entered, but I soon found out that the Gas-cooker is without gas, the fridge is within-plans, no kettle, no utensils, .... you get the picture.
Plasma TV with extra stereo-speakers, but not connected to the cables (the box is there). etc etc.

As I said though - soft landing - as much as it will get to here. I'm on the 24th floor, overlooking the city-center's famous "green lake" park, the shower does work, and does have hot water, I have a bed, there's a leaving room with couches.

View from my bedroom, over Green Lake and a 100 year-old but active military training facility

Oh yea, and I have a fully Chinese-capable roommate. Yea. Chinese non-privacy and all.  He's called Zhang. Excellent, extremely friendly and touchy guy. Old-school, and yet very open to experience the weird foreigner mind. One of my proudest moments thus far is when I managed to get him to say "Drink Tea" (rather than "drink'a-tea") - not as easy as it sounds.
Zhang is ex-military, and not a newbie to Kunming or Yunnan - he was down in the south of Yunnan bombarding Vietnamese cities back in the days. He's actually from Shanxi province.
Zhang is very caring, as I said, so after I found myself locked out of the apartment one night at 2AM, as he decided to use an extra bolt on the door ... when we were asking him about the extra-locking, he really wanted to know when and where I went out to.

Working with this school's staff on getting things to the apartment, is really a quick-course into some work and general ethics here. Of course, this is about to be a very generalized quick-and-dirty generalization, but that's how observations work. Reliability, Accountability, Delivery ... not really. And I'm actually talking directly to the office's American program manager. This has been a daily routine, in which I'm being promised that a whole bunch of things would be at the apartment "today". I mean, how difficult can it be to buy a few plates, glasses and a kettle?!

All and all, things are good and comfy - as far as it can get here, I guess. By now I have a fridge, a hot/cold water dispenser (bottled), bought a few DVD's for the TV, got a local phone, laying low in a big city (next little post on that I guess), listening to Chinese-opera enthusiasts at the park from the 24th floor.