A Tale of Two Cakes
Sorry we have not updated this blog for two months. For some reason, access to our blog site from China has been blocked. Probably our comments about the buses have upset the powers that be! If you can read this it’s because we have emailed it to UK for one of the family to upload. If you can’t read it, that idea didn’t work either.
We had an excellent visit from Richard and Hazel Padfield in May. We went together to Dali and Lijiang, two old Chinese towns which have been restored for the benefit of tourists like us. In Lijiang we stayed in the Naxi Tea Horse Family Guest House, a traditional Chinese courtyard building in the centre of the old town. The Naxi are a local minority people and the tea horses were used to carry tea along the Silk Road. It was really interesting travelling by bus to these two towns, especially for Richard who is a farmer. It was rice planting season so we saw hundreds of people bending over in the paddy fields, quite different from the mechanised farming in UK.
With less than four weeks to go before we leave Kunming we have started taking photographs of the people and places we have come to love, and Judy has gone into ‘last minute buying’ mode, because most of our stuff will need to be sent off by sea in near future. We can’t believe how much stuff we have managed to accumulate in just over a year!
It’s the rainy season here and it has been particularly wet and cold this July, we look at the people ploughing up and down the swimming pool below our window and think how hardy they are!
Judy has been making jam and cakes, with varying amounts of success. She bought some Chinese wheat flour and added some extra baking powder to the recipe (to make up for the altitude) - you can see the result in the sneaky picture Peter took. 
It was supposed to be lemon drizzle cake, but ended up being Niagara Falls Cake as it erupted from the tin and cascaded into the oven.
Things went much better on Judy’s birthday, when friends 
brought over a magnificent cake and plenty of candles to go with it! We had supper in the revolving restaurant on the 21st floor of a Kunming Hotel This turned out to be a fascinating experience, as different parts of the floor (and ceiling) appeared to revolve in different directions and at different speeds. It was also tricky for the staff, because they would step into the room in a different place each time they brought the food, then they had to trot around the circle until they found our table. We were convinced that only the outer section and core of the restaurant were moving, and we were staying still, until we got up to leave and realised that Kunming University Library had moved!
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