Black Dragon Cafe

If you’re interested in English teaching in Dali, here are a couple contacts:

Penny Chen
Weekend classes for school kids.
whoispenny@yahoo.com.cn
15911210993

One-to-one (school age)
The child of a Hong Long Jing cafe owner
13987275142

Dali old town now has a children’s library in Jiulongju (the pedestrian street north of Honglongjing). There’s a paid annual membership, or if you just want to try it out for the day it’s RMB 20, you can take books home just like a regular library and there’s a reading club.

The reading club is 3.30pm every Saturday and lasts about an hour. Jason and I read a couple stories (always at least one in Chinese and English), but the best bit is the kids themselves stand up and tell stories. Every week we have about five kids reading aloud to everybody.

Please note that most of the books and the reading club are in Chinese, so your kids need to be fluent to enjoy it.

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So you should have already opened your Alipay (Chinese paypal) account.

Then, on the taobao homepage click on the Register for Free (“免费注册”) link on the top left.
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Alipay (支付宝 zhīfùbǎo) is a Chinese PayPal, an online payment service that lets you buy stuff from Taobao, the Chinese Ebay. This post explains how to set up an account – be warned, it takes about an hour.

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Why would I want to?

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC 工商银行 gōngshāng yínháng) is the preferred bank to use in conjunction with AliPay, the Chinese version of the PayPal online payment service. Once you have an online ICBC account, you can get an AliPay account. Once you have an AliPay account, then you can start using Taobao - the Chinese version of Ebay. And that means lots of goodies at low, low prices :)

To open an online ICBC account, first you have to go to the bank…

1. Take the following to your local ICBC: (more…)

This (paraphrased) quote below is from a book published a couple years ago. Entitled People of Yun Nan , it came out with a spate of books that tried to pin down the traits of people from different regions of China (one was entitled “I’d Rather Be Dead Than A Shanghainese Man” ). The books trot out the usual stereotypes and were hugely popular. However, even living here a while, I still find these stereotypes interesting:

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An (American) friend of ours asked us about buying a house in Yunnan , and I thought some of it might be useful so I’ve posted it. It’s all off the top of my head, just meant to give a few pointers, not a comprehensive guide or anything. Anyway, hope it helps…
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The local information service that you access from using your mobile’s SMS, like Shanghai’s Guanxi service, will soon be coming to Kunming. Unfortunately, as the city is slightly behind Shanghai in the international metropolis stakes, they will only be offering the service in Chinese, but it will work the same way. Send an SMS with the name of a restaurant, a company or even a short description (Kunming driving school) and you’ll get the contact details sent back to you. The number, when the service is launched later this year, will be 50120.

If you want some mobile phone excitment to tide you over, there is the Yunnan news-to-phone service which has only been around for a couple months. Known as Spring City Mobile News, it has been put together by the Yunnan Daily, with content from its own paper as well as Spring City Evening News, Dianchi Lake Morning Post, Yunnan Economic Daily and others.

News content covers Yunnan, China and international stories, as well as finance, sports, and entertainment, and costs RMB 5 per month. Send the message “01″ to the number “08878″ to subscribe. Subscribers can also customize the service by choosing different versions depending on preference (”best of”, “entertainment” etc).

There are over 8,700,000 mobile users in Yunnan province as of the end of 2005, a phone for one in five of Yunnan’s population.

The company behind the SMS information service is DNS (新网互联), www.dns.com.cn [in Chinese].

Information about the news-to-phone service is in this Yunnan Daily article. [in Chinese]

Spring City Mobile News《春城手机报》 chun1 cheng2 shou3 ji1 bao4