First day of house hunting

We started out this morning with breakfast in the hotel.  As usual, they had a wide selection of Asian and Western selections.  I started with toast, but then added Yunnan noodles and fruit to it.  Michael decided to go all out Chinese and had the noodle hot bowl.  This is a meal that you make yourself by starting with rice noodles, adding vegetables and/or meat to the top.  You then dip up your selection of sauces (Michael did LOTS of chili sauce).  The soup is completed by adding some broth from a pot that is simmering nearby.    He thought that it was wonderful and happily slurped his way thru breakfast.

We were met at 9:00 by our driver and driven to Doug’s house where we were joined by Doug and also a Canadian scientist (Bob) who lives part time in Kunming.

The plan for the day was to look at available houses and see if we could find one that we liked.  We are looking for a townhouse and were confused by the fact that there were so few of them available.  As we talked to Doug, we found out that the Kunming government made a plan to bring a lot more people to the city in the next few years as this helps their status with the national government.  To this end, about 18 months ago, they quit allowing “single family dwellings” to be built and instead are putting in high rise apartment buildings.

We did look at 5 different homes, however two of those were duplexes with the bottom three floors being one house and the next two floors being a second one.  Unfortunately, we did not find one that we both liked and that we thought we could easily live in.  There are two more that we will look at tomorrow.

We returned to the hotel about 3:00 and spent some time talking, relaxing and taking a short stroll around the Green Lake Park.    At about 7:00 we decided to go out to Salvadore’s Coffee Shop which is about ½ mile from the hotel.  We had visited there on the last trip and wanted to try the food.  It is owned by four American’s and the menu is extensive....mostly Western food.  We had a couple of sandwiches and then headed back to the hotel.