Kunming, A big city

2-3-2010 Today is our second day in Kunming. Matthew and I are having trouble adjusting to the time change. Yesterday I finally feel asleep at around 9am here. It was hard waking up. Matthew went out to exchange money and I got up and showered. We were hoping we might be able to change rooms. We currently have two twin beds. They are very hard. After the first night sleeping on them and having our bones hurt we put both the matrices on one bed. It helped a little but it was still hard to sleep. We still woke up at around 5 am. We ate danishes, feeding the problem and read some in China A to Z. Yesterday Matthew and I wondered around the safe streets. The ones we could see the hostel from. We didn't stared at as much as we thought we would. That was until we got lunch. Then everyone was looking at us funny. Matthew got more looks than me. Little kids like to point at us. It is kind of amusing. I have been feeling like a giant. I'm taller than a lot of men here. It baffles me. I went from being about average height and really skinny to being bigger than the average. All of the women here, well most of them, ware heels and I'm still taller than them. I'm thinking that if I buy clothes I will be close to a large. For lunch Matthew and I ended up eating at a place called 'My Favorite Restaurant'. It had an ice-cream called Dryer's, a leading American Brand. Dryer's I've never heard of it before? The containers looked like Eddie's and we thought that maybe the name was bad in Chinese so they changed it. After lunch Matthew and I bought water and danishes. Then we went back to the hostel. We were just going to use the internet to try and connect with some people here as we are feeling a little lost. Matthew wants to eat at Pizza hut as he thinks it would be easier. We didn't but we do have a really big language barrier. We ended up taking a nap. Not a short one but a really long nap. We went to sleep around 4 and didn't wake up until way after it was dark. I think it was around 8:30 or 9 when we got up. We ate dinner at the restaurant under our hostel. We didn't really know what we were getting and our waitress spoke some English but not that much. Matthew and I though we were learning Mandarin but we didn't learn enough. We ended up getting a seafood broth which had a whole fish in it. We didn't eat the poor fish. We ordered veggies to put in the broth and we kept trying to put them in but the waitress would come and say not yet. So we waited for the broth to boil. There was a burner build into the table with a propane tank under the table. Our poor waitress had to show us how to do everything. She came and put the veggies in for us and then told us when we could eat. We put potatoes, nappy cabbage, and bean curd noodles in. She thought it was funny at times but I thing she might have found us trying at times. One thing I really can't get used to is all the cigarette smoke. I find it really unpleasant. However unlike the U.S newly smoke free, China likes to smoke. I think if I stay here long enough I'm going to snap and yell at someone for smoking in doors. They smoke everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Today Matthew and I had a good breakfast at the hostel. It saved us from wandering around lost, which we ended up doing later anyway. We had an Israeli egg dish. I really liked it even though the eggs were not scrambled. I normally don't like egg whites. Around noon we left the hostel to go and see what some of the other hostels were like. We started by trying to go to Kunming Coundland International Hostel. We got really lost. On the way there we saw lots and lots of piano stores. They were all next to each other. It was odd seeing all the different brands right next to each other. I found a violin in one of the piano shops. It was really very nice. The sound was good. I would have had trouble tuning it as it didn't have the fine tuners but it played well. It was pretty expensive in comparison to what I wanted to pay. We spent over an hour after we to to the area with the hostel trying to find it before we started asking direction. Even then we had trouble. We finally asked at a bank and then we got some good directions. The hostel was okay but not as nice as the one we were at. Also it was more expensive. We were to tired to look at any of the other hostels. We went to the Carre four to get a transformer for power. Carre four is a french version of Wal Mart. It was overwhelming and we asked but couldn't find a power converter. After all the walking Matthew and I are starting to get a better feel for the city.