Family Fridays: Family Hike

Edge of Kunming

We really appreciate a lot of the conveniences available to us in this big city of Kunming. The ability to get dairy, whole grains, and clean chicken (without having to kill it myself) is truly appreciated. But at heart, we are not really city people, so sometimes we like to escape to nature. God's beautiful creation is so refreshing.

So Thursday we decided to do just that. We walked quite a ways to get to the edge of the city. Kunming is basically in a bowl of hills and mountains. It is very beautiful. Whenever you get to the edge of the city, you pretty much hit a hill or a mountain. So after walking to the edge of town we started going up, up, up.

Temple

Nate and Aaron had taken a bus part of the way before and done a little exploring to find a nice path so we started walking up the road. We walking past a temple and heard some chanting. Walked past a few more buildings to the much smaller walking path. A lot of it was paved, but it had a lot of steps. Nate had his work cut out for him with the stroller, and I carried Andrew part of the way.

Easy flat part of the path

I am amazed had how much of the trail that the little boys actually walked themselves. Aaron walked the whole trail by himself, holding onto a parent's hand when it was a little dangerous. And Andrew walked all of the flat parts holding onto my hand and a lot of the steps. He allowed me to carry him some of the way up, but insisted on walking almost the entire way down himself.

Andrew doing it by himself

Of course they had been riding in the stroller all the way up to the path, and back through town as well. So they still didn't have nearly as much walking as we did, and they still had plenty of energy to run around when we got home.

Mommy and Andrew

It was a fun afternoon in the woods. The boy really like hiking in the hills. Aaron and Nate went a little further up and got some more pine cones for us to use for crafts. Aaron is really excited about making something with the pine cones. And yes we did check everyone over really well for any bugs. None to be found.

Daddy and Aaron

Looking back at Kunming

Family Friday: Dinner, Grocery, and Bus Adventures

Yesterday, we had the opportunity to visit the extremely nice Chinese-American gentleman who hosted us the night we first arrived. Sam is back in town a for a few weeks and kindly invited us out to dinner with his wife and son. They took us to a very nice Chinese restaurant near their home. I have never seen a fancy restaurant with a playplace, but I think that it is an idea that Olive Garden and even higher end American restaurants should pursue, because it made the evening so enjoyable. The boys were able to play while we visited, and everyone was happy. After we talked for a while, gave them a small gift, and attempted unsuccessfully to pay the bill (Sam really is to nice to us), we agreed to keep in touch and bid them good night.

We thought since we were already right next to Metro (a German version of Walmart), we would try to stock up on a few bulk purchases before heading home. We got pasta, tomato paste, oatmeal, peanut butter, real Hellman's mayonnaise, and a huge tub of chocolate ice cream. The ice cream is the only item that is not fabulous, but the boys love it (Aaron has nick-named it, "a big ol' kind of ice cream"), and it is cheap to buy it this way. Thankfully, we were able to find everything we were looking for and ended up purchasing about 24 kilos (50 pounds) of western food staples for about $60 US, which is quite a good price for rare and imported items. Besides making everything yourself, buying in bulk is the only really affordable way to have western food here. It is nice that we are able to have some of these convenience foods on hand for some easy meals. Yes, these are convenience foods to us, and no I didn't always view these as convenience foods either. Hopefully, these items will last us about two months.

On a very crowded bus

Now for the inconvenient part of the story: the bus system. To get to this part of town, we needed to take two buses. We were late getting to Sam's house for dinner in the first place because we had to wait a long time to get the connecting bus, and boy was it packed. It was so packed in fact that for several stops, they couldn't accept any more passengers. This very rarely happens on a double decker bus. There were even people standing on the stairs.

A not so crowded bus

We were really hoping that it wouldn't be quite so crowded on the way home, as we had 4 bags of food, 2 small boys, and 1 awesome but still bulky double stroller to get on and off of two buses to go home. We were really blessed and got seats on both buses on the way home. We were very glad to be home. We had some big ol' kind of ice cream and went straight to bed.

Nate is very glad that he won't have to ride the buses so often for a while as he finished his first semester of classes and has a short break before classes resume in the fall.