Finding lodging for the second night

Schie spent the afternoon at the German embassy sorting out some visa paperwork for her upcoming return to Germany, and would need to leave the city afterwards, so I dedicated some time towards other matters. My first night was arranged by her, but I figured I can handle the second night without help. Oooh boy, was I in for a tough lesson.

What I wasn't aware of is that hotels apparently need a license and certain types of gear to host foreign tourists. If they don't have that, they simply don't host them, and instead focus entirely on Chinese mainland tourists. Well, I had booked one place online, which got canceled immediately. I booked another place, they canceled my booking on site when I went to check in. I wanted to book another, but there at least the booking failed at the last step for the same reason. So I decided to just walk into another hotel instead of wasting more time with booking attempts, but they also sent me on my way without any new knowledge.

I finally relented and gave in, paying way too much money for a way to fancy hotel, which wasn't opposed to hosting me, but they were completely irritated by me not having a visa (I arrived with a visa exemption), which caused some chaos at checkin again. My room was huge and very nice, but I didn't really need any of the amenities they supplied...

Schie stopped by after running her errands, and then took an afternoon train to head off to her home city some three hours by train away from Kunming.

After that, I spent a whole SIX HOURS trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to any Wi-Fi network, which is when I found out about the Great Firewall of China that the country leadership is imposing to restrict access to western websites. Among social media services such as Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, also some productivity services such as from Google are blocked. My phone is a Google phone, testing online status through checking Google servers, and they were all unreachable, so it always believed it was offline. It's an actual issue for some people in China!

While I was able to use my phone normally by roaming on my European contract, I didn't understand why I couldn't get my laptop to work despite using a VPN to keep my connection private. Still haven't figured that out...Read more