A couple photos from the Yunnan trip. I’ll work on getting the rest of the good ones up to my Flickr photostream tomorrow.

One of the sights of Kunming is a pair of pagodas which face each other at either end of a street. At the West Pagoda, was also this building, which had mysteriously had its front wall removed. Very odd, but not overly surprising (it’s China, everything is under construction), and made for an interesting image.

Also ran across this on the streets of Kunming. It wasn’t the only one either. It occurred to me somewhat later that maybe it is to cater to all the short-legged doggies that trot through the streets.

At the East Pagoda I paid a small fee to enter the walled garden surrounding it. I never got around to really inspecting the pagoda itself because I almost immediately got caught up watching mahjong. I have a sketchy understanding of the game, thanks to coworker back in Seattle who has patiently tried to teach a number of us how to play. It’s not actually as simple as match the tiles — that’s only the American computer version.

I’m often shy about taking photos of people. In this case I compromised between really wanting to photograph the scene (there were some very amazing elderly faces – one guy with absolutely huge coke-bottle classes) and not wanting to disturb the game to ask (plus not having the language skills to ask) with photographing hands instead of faces.

As you may or may not know, there is a Muslim population in China. In Yunnan there were a number of restaurants with signs out front in Arabic as well as Chinese. This man had no sign, but he sold me some tasty food on a stick. This was in a tourist-ridden shopping area of Kunming, so I figured he was probably used to having his photo taken. He seemed indifferent, overall.

Wandering around later, I found an indoor-outdoor market. There were living and less-living animals, and sacks of grain and spices as well as vegetables, with an accompanying smell and flies in the meat section. I find it fascinating that they have squash this big — seriously, they are three feet long and look like they must be radioactive zucchini, or something.

The man selling the vegetables, though, was thoroughly immune to their amazingness and gave me an extremely puzzled look which indicated he did not understand why some crazy white girl was photographing his vegetables.

Also, the man in the back of the photo is spritzing his veggies with water, with a handy homemade device. Take a plastic pop bottle, poke a couple holes in the lid. Fill the bottle with water, attach lid, hold upside down and squeeze. No spring loaded thingmabobs required for spritzing in China.