Kunming

Last weekend the family and I headed to Kunming to visit some friends working down in Kunming. The essence of the trip was to catch up with our friends, so we didn't make a significant amount of time to do sightseeing. On Saturday morning, the kids and I were free, but only had a couple of hours. As a result, we decided to go to Cui Hu (Jade Lake) in downtown Kunming. The park around the lake isn't anything too special, but it was a great day and we were able to rent a paddle boat and go for a paddle boat ride out on the lake. The kids had a great time chasing the ducks (although they were just sitting back while I was the one paddling to chase the ducks…and ducks are pretty fast), and they were all excited to run around the bridges in the park.

Over the rest of the weekend we spent time with friends and met some really cool people, actually I met some Norwegians, which are the first born and raised Norwegians that I have ever met in my life so that was pretty cool. One other thing that came out of the weekend was how I figured out what kind of great life we have here in Shanghai. If we were in Kunming our lives would be totally different and totally less western as compared to our lives here, so while people in the US think we are bold for living in Shanghai, we have it really good here, I take my hat off to the expats that are living in smaller cities such as Kunming that do not have all the creature comforts we get here in Shanghai.