The Return to Kunming

The bus trip back was considerably less interesting (thank goodness!). We almost missed the bus, which gave Dylan and I both a heart-attack, but it turned out ok. We bought our bus tickets through the hotel, but then the lady tried to explain to us where to pick up the bus, and neither one of us really understood what she was saying. We asked if we needed to go to the long-distance bus station, which is where we arrived the first time, and she said yes. We were running behind that morning and se we were already cutting it close when we grabbed a taxi and headed for the bus station, only to find out when we arrived there that this wasn’t the place we needed to be. We had to take another tax back to a different location to find the actual place with the bus, and though we were late, they had waited, and it turned out we weren’t even the last ones to arrive. We were pretty freaked out, though.

This time it was a regular bus, not a sleeper, and pretty classy. They had a steward as well, who went around giving everyone bottles of water and little trash bags. Early on there was a shouting match over whether or not some people were leaning their chairs too far back, but other than that it was cool. They showed two movies. The first one was the “Curse of the Golden Flower” which I had seen before and really liked, so I enjoyed watching that again. The second movie they showed near the end of the trip and it was really weird. It was a comedy making fun of a bunch of movies, some of which I knew, but a lot of which were unfamiliar to me so I missed a lot of the jokes. It was all in Chinese with no subtitles, but certain kinds of humor transcend language barriers.