Today, I set off with my parents on a new trip today to Yunnan Province, in the south west of China. Yunnan has a population of 42 million people, twice that of Australia. It has borders with Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi Provinces, and also borders with Tibet, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. So the South east asian culture and environment can be seen a little here. It is 394,000 sq km, compared with Australia at 7,617,930 sq km. The lonely planet says "Yunnan is without doubt one of the most alluring destinations in China.... If you only get to one province in China, this might as well be it." 
My parents are visiting for about a month so we set off to Yunnan for 9 days. Today we travelled to Kunming, Yunnan's capital, by plane (3 hours). We checked into a hotel and then spent the day wandering around the city. It's a fairly industrial city (pop 4 million) and pretty standard for a large Chinese city, I didn't find anything there too unusual. One thing worth mentioning is there there seem to be heaps of solar hot water systems on the roofs of many of the buildings. Whoever got the contract for that would have made a killing because they're everywhere. Easy to tell which way is south as they all face in the that direction.
My parents are still getting used to the culture so they were happy to wander the city. We had some lamb kebabs from a street stall - Muslim style, with chilli, and some other spices, maybe cumin and tumeric. Absolutely delicious, and haven't had any problems with street food so far (only with Western food...).
We walked through a shopping mall, and you could have been anywhere in the world, all the same. We saw a shop where you can get laser eye surgery. Not sure how much it costs or what the success rate is....
We also wandered through some more grassroots markets. The picture of the meat stall is a common image all around China, I feel a little cautious about buying meat from these places because its just sitting out in the open for hours on end. This market also had live chickens and we all baulked a bit as we walked through since supposedly bird flu can be contracted from dust infected with bird faeces in these markets. The vegie and fruit stalls are also a common site and I have to say the fruit I have here on a regular basis (including from the local 'wet' market in Shanghai - ie meat, seafood, fruit and vegies) is much better than the fruit and vegies that I have in Australia or the US. Its much fresher and hasn't been hanging around half frozen in store rooms and trucks for a few weeks before you buy it (like it has been in Woolworths and Safeway).
We tried to get to a restaurant called '1910 Gare du Sud', recommended in the lonely planet, serving Yunnan specialities. However it was down some back alley, and the Chinese name for the restaurant sounds like South Train Station, so the taxi driver started taking us there until we realized the mistake, but we still couldn't find the place. We ended up going to another restaurant, Brothers Jiang, which serves across-the-bridge noodles, another Yunnan specialty. They bring you all these dishes of raw vegies and semi cooked meat (and raw eggs) and rice noodles. Then they bring you a steaming soup and you put everything in there to cook, and then eat it. It was interesting but I didn't find it very flavoursome. Apparently Brothers Jiang is a bit of a chain store so that might explain it.
Apart from that we managed to find a convenience store and stocked up on some Western type snacks which are always good to have handy.
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