this is a fun story; our boat stopped the second morning of our trip for people who paid extra to go on a tour of some side river or something; anyways, they left at 5:30am so i had no interest; while they were gone we were able to get off the boat and go around the town we were docked in; we had a couple of hours so we just started walking through the streets looking to stir up trouble; in southern china it is popular (maybe common is a better word) for people to walk around carrying stuff with a bamboo pole on their shoulders; i saw just about everything carried this way including suitcases and lots of different kinds of food; anyways, the town was really hilly and there were these two ladies (pictured) lugging their produce up a long hill; they stopped for a rest so curtis and i decided we would try to offer them free shoulder massages since they were bound to be sore after carrying those things every day; keeping in mind that we don't speak chinese, we just kind of went up to them and started trying to rub their shoulders, they started to freak out a little and curtis finally remembered the word for massage but it didn't really help, they weren't receptive to our offer of kindness and were very insistant in saying something (who knows what) ..anyways, they were still our friends so i decided to try to pick up the lady's beans and hope she wouldn't think i was trying to steal them; we had (of course) drawn a croud so they were all quite amused to see me do something 'chinese'; on a serious note, it is a hard life that these people live; their entire livelyhood may be to lug around baskets of green beans everyday and hope to get enough money to survive; i've seen some pretty unbelievable things here in kunming regarding poverty and such and i can't wait to share some of it with you guys.