Kunming has Yunnan's first and only IMAX theater. The theater is part of a complex of multiple high rise buildings housing shops, offices and residential dwellings in the heart of downtown Kunming. The development's shopping mall including the IMAX theater opened in January 2010.

When we arrived in town in late February the inaugural show Avatar was playing. Tickets for all shows were still in high demand and went on sale 3 days in advance. On a Tuesday right after lunch at Keats School, we scurried to the box office and secured tickets to see Avatar on the following Friday afternoon.

The 3-D IMAX show was in English with Chinese subtitles. While we had to imagine what the Pandorans were saying, Chinese subtitles translated these conversations as well. (At ordinary theaters the 3-D version is dubbed in Chinese.)

The central government closed all of the non-IMAX, non-3-D shows (the lowest ticket price) due to 'low box office receipts'. The real reason may be that government censors view the story as a bit too close to home: To make way for large-scale new or re-development, government routinely orders people off farmland or to vacate residential and commercial blocks. Not uncommonly, people protest what they view as government's heavy handed tactics.

Pirated versions of the show, dubbed in Chinese, are widely available on DVD, so anyone who wants to see the show can easily do so.

The Spring City's mild climte is ideal for flowering trees and plants. During any season something will be in bloom. In March spring annuals, azalea, wisteria and the fruit trees are blooming: cherry, peach, crab apple and pear. As in California, bougainvillea blooms luxuriantly year around.

Because of the mild and mostly sunny climate, commercial flower growing is a thriving business. All kinds of flowers grown in the Kunming area are shipped for sale in flower markets all over China and Southeast Asia.

Since the 1990s Kunming has undergone extensive redevelopment and population growth. Tom first visited the city in 1987 and remembers a small city of one to two story buildings and narrow streets crowded with bicycles.

Now taxis, private cars and buses speed along 6-lane wide, tree-lined boulevards. Drivers obey traffic signals and rules of the road and they do not drive with their horns the way drivers do in Nepal and India.

Throngs of electric bikes and traditional bicycles own the wide bike lanes on both sides of major streets. Pedestrians have the wide sidewalks to themselves and don't have to share them with bicycles as in Tokyo.

Unlike in Berkeley and Tokyo, any vehicle that rolls on wheels in Kunming has right-of-way over pedestrians. At intersections of any size, and especially when crossing a street with a 'walk' signal, pedestrians must be on the lookout for vehicles turning across their paths.

Kunming has become a city of modern high-rise office buildings and multi-story urban shopping malls with shops selling international luxury designer brands. There are innumerable clusters of high-rise apartment/condo blocks. This is the view from my classroom window:

Historically, many residents lived in blocks of 7-story walk-up flats.

These old apartments are being rapidly demolished to make room for high-rise apartment blocks. Many residents of the old accommodations may be happy to move into more modern dwellings but unhappy about the increased cost.

Throughout the central city vast construction projects are underway on whole city-block areas. One such project is across the street from our language school. From our 16th floor window we see and hear men and machines working 24 hours/day, 7 days/week.

In breaks from studying, we stroll over for a close-up view.

For hundreds of years Kunming has been a hub for trade between Southeast Asia, India and China's heartland to the north and east. Overland trade through Kunming extends back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907AD) and probably earlier.

Kunming was the hub of the ancient Tea Horse Trail over which traders (mostly Yunnanese Muslims) transported goods by pony and mule caravan over an area extending from Assam, Burma, Thailand and Laos in the south, to the Chamdo region of eastern Tibet and the south China provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou and Guangxi.

The city's modern prosperity dates from 1910 when a railroad line opened to Hanoi. Besides railroad connection to Vietnam, roads connect the city to Laos, Myanmar and Thailand.

The central government is positioning Kunming to be the trade, transport, financial and cultural center of Southeast Asia. Steadily expanding direct air links to all major Chinese cities, most major cities in Southeast Asia, and some major cities in Japan and South Korea are helping to achieve this objective. A new international airport, under construction and scheduled to open in 2012, will be the fourth largest in China (after Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong).

Air links to India are likely to be opened as well. On February 28 we took Air China's inaugural flight from Bangalore, India, to Chengdu, China, where we connected to another Air China flight to Kunming (the flight from Bangalore continued on to Shanghai). On April 30 we will fly nonstop from Kunming to Kathmandu.

In his book, Yunnan: China South of the Clouds, author Jim Goodman argues that there are really two Chinas. One is the Middle Kingdom, the relatively low-lying central and eastern provinces bordered on the east by oceans and on the west by inhospitable terrain. This periphery, with its steppes, deserts, high plateaus and rugged mountains, is the ‘Other China,’ which comprises 60% of China's present area.

The Han comprise about 92% of China's current population and is heir to thousands of years of common history, tradition and cultural characteristics. The dense population of the eastern Middle Kingdom is almost exclusively Han.

In the Other China, people from different civilizations and ethnic origins have blended with each other and with Chinese culture for thousands of years. People of the country's 55 recognized minority nationalities make up the remaining 8% of the country’s overall population and are scattered primarily around the periphery,

Yunnan is home to 24 ethnic minorities and to one third of China's non-Han population. Nearly half of the province's population of over 45 million is non-Han.

Ever since Khublai Khan made Yunnan part of his empire in the mid-1200s, the area has, to varying degrees, been under Chinese rule. Despite the various governments' efforts over the centuries of Chinese rule, numerous pockets of the province have resisted Han influence and have retained strong local cultural identities.

Yunnan is the sixth largest of China's 22 provinces. The province is slightly larger than Montana and slightly smaller than California and is larger than either Japan, Germany or the UK.

The province is located in China's southwest corner and borders Burma (Myanmar), Laos and Vietnam. The northwest corner borders Tibet, but the rest of the northern border is with Sichuan province with weather dominated by clouds and rain.

A legend says that a Nanzhao prince of Dali, in present day Yunnan, visited the Tang Dynasty court, he told the emperor that his land was south of the rainy weather. The emperor then dubbed that territory 'Yunnan' – South of the Clouds.

Yunnan does, in fact, enjoy some of the best weather in China. Its southern latitude along with its mountain chains and vast hill-studded high plateau account for the temperate climate. Only at low elevations along the southern border is the climate tropical.

Both culturally and physically Yunnan forms the northern rim of Southeast Asia and is subject to the annual monsoon from May through October. In other seasons days are usually sunny and mild, with cold winters only in the mountainous northwest.

Because of the province's diverse geography, it is home to China's greatest variety of plant and animal species. Among the 30,000 species of plants in China, 18,000 can be found in Yunnan.

Yunann’s pillar industries are tobacco, agriculture, mining and tourism. The province is rich in hydropower, both developed and undeveloped, and in mineral reserves. It has China's largest reserves of aluminum, lead, zinc and tin and major reserves of copper and nickel.

Yunnan is one of China's relatively undeveloped provinces and has more poverty-striken counties than most other provinces. While the province lags behind the east coast in relation to socio-economic development, its geographic location gives it a competitive advantage in terms of emerging trade and commerce with Southeast Asia and India.

The Chinese language school where we are studying for nine weeks is in Kunming. We had visited Kunming on previous trips to China and found it to be a very pleasant city. When we searched the internet for Chinese language schools in China, we were surprised and pleased to find such a school in Kunming.

A medium-sized city by Chinese standards, greater Kunming's population is about 8 million. The city is the capital of Yunnan Province.

Yunnan encompasses a vast range of geography: the eastern edge of the high Himalayas, the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, deep river gorges including one of the world's deepest, and tropical jungles. Consequently the variety of plant and animal species is comparably large. Additionally, ethnic minorities make up 35 percent of the province's population.

Because of its location in the heart of such a unique mixture of both peoples and geography, the central government has designated Kunming as a 'special tourist zone' (tourists are primarily from other parts of China). In my 'South of the Clouds' post I'll have more to say about Yunnan.

Kunming is located on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, a fertile lake basin surrounded on the east, north and south by mountains. The Tropic of Cancer is just north of the city, but because of its high elevation (about 1900 meters/6200 feet) the city enjoys a mild climate throughout the year and is known as 'The Spring City'.

Studying Chinese? What are we thinking of?

In the future we plan to travel in China and may even do some business in China. So learning to speak and read some Chinese will come in handy in the future.

Tom and I arrived in Kunming Sunday, February 28. Our Chinese language classes began at Keats School on Monday morning, March 1. You can check out the school’s website and even take a video tour of the school: www.keatsschool.com

Our classes meet Monday through Friday from 8:30am-12:30pm, with a short break mid-way. A few students have class in the afternoon instead of morning. The school pairs each student with a teacher appropriate for that student’s previous knowledge of Chinese as well as learning goals.

Each teacher teaches no more than two students, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. He or she customizes each day’s lesson based on the previous day’s work. The teachers are closely supervised and advised by the school’s curriculum director.

My teacher is Lulu Ma, age 20. Pronounced with appropriate tones, Lulu is her Chinese given name. She has taught at Keats School for two months. In the afternoon she teaches another older student, a 55 year-old man. Like most Keats teachers, Lulu is a university student. She is majoring in English and hopes to continue her studies this fall in Melbourne, Australia, focusing on translation. She is also quite an accomplished pianist and loves to play basketball.

Tom’s teacher is Min-Shu Lai. She and Lulu are the same age, grew up together in a village near Kunming and are very good friends. They live with one other student in a six-person Yunnan University dormitory room. Min-Shu is also majoring in English. She has passed the exam to qualify for Communist Party membership and is engaged in required classes during the one-year waiting period before becoming a Party member. (For many of China’s best jobs, Party members have priority over non-members with equal test scores.) After graduation she plans to work, save money and then spend time in a foreign country. Her uncle has lived in New York for 18 years and her nephew is a graduate of Northwestern.

I am learning to speak survival Manadrin, which involves learning grammar and vocabulary. My first task is learning to pronounce and hear the language’s syllables. Spoken Manadrin has about 350 possible syllables, each of which can be pronounced using one of four distinct tones (inflections) plus a neutral tone. Tones are part of the word and must be learned carefully to avoid saying the wrong word. Students not learning Chinese characters can write words using the pinyin romanization, which uses the western alphabet to represent Mandarin pronunciation.

Tom, for whom language study is a serious hobby, has set himself a much more challenging goal. Along with learning vocabulary and grammar, he is learning to read and write Chinese characters. In addition to the intensive language study, the school offers calligraphy as an elective. So two evenings each week Tom practices calligraphy with a local master.

Students come and go. During our first week, there were about 15 students. The students are multi-national, almost every one with an interesting story: Americans, British, Chinese-Japanese-British, British (living in Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok), Belgian, French, Japanese and Spanish. Besides Tom and me, the only other couple is an African-American man and his Japanese wife who met at graduate school in America.

Most students live and dine at the school. The school’s office, classrooms, kitchen, dining room, library and computer room are on the 16th floor of a 20-story mixed-use building located near the center of downtown Kunming. One of the city’s many banks occupies the street level.

The school’s cook prepares three Chinese meals each weekday in the small, well-equipped kitchen adjacent to the dining room. Breakfast (8-8:30am), lunch (12:30-1pm) and dinner (6-6:30pm) are served buffet style. There are usually 10 to 12 different dishes including two different fresh seasonal fruits.

Tom and I are serious students. On school days we take a long walk after lunch, then study afternoons and evenings. I have never taken easily to foreign languages but am amazed that I’m actually beginning to be able to speak some fairly simple sentences. Tom’s ability to speak is increasing much more rapidly than mine. Both of us are enjoying the challenge and are impressed with the overall quality of the school.