...wherein the travelers haggle for cherries, ride bikes, and eat grubs.
Part two of the trip was spent in Lijiang and Kunming, cities in the southwestern province of Yunnan. If you spend much time in China, you'll hear about the celebrated 55 ethnic minorities (including, er, Koreans and Kazakhs) living there. You can even get a set of ethnic minority dolls at Pearl River Mart on Canal Street here in New York. Lots of these minorities live in Yunnan province, which is bordered by Laos, Burma, Vietnam, Tibet, and several Chinese provinces.
Lijiang is a small town in the northwestern part of Yunnan. The old part of town is paved with cobblestones and closed off to cars (and people are supposed to walk their bikes). Little canals run through it where people do their washing and where fish swim motionless against the current.
It has exploded in popularity as a tourist destination even in the six years since I've been there, which means it has a slight Disney air and that techno blasts onto the main square at night. The upshot of having so many tourists -- among them, westerners -- is that it was very easy to get vodka. We stopped for a cocktail every day, and usually we had peanuts (really, really good peanuts probably deep fried and then dusted with MSG). But one day, after T had half joked about buying some grubs to snack on, my uncle Jon presented him with a little packet of these at cocktail hour:
I hate to admit to being squeamish about food, but I had second thoughts about munching on these guys. Turned out to be unfounded -- they were so drenched in oil that they were pretty much flavorless, and had the texture of, well, fried stuff. No guts spilling out, not even really a crunchy carapace. (Did I just say carapace?)
Much better were the sour cherries being sold by nice, and not-so-nice, ladies on the street. One afternoon, my dad had a hankering for some cherries, and a not-so-nice lady was offering them for what was pretty cheap objectively, but what amounted to highway robbery compared to some of the other prices we'd gotten. T took a photo essay of my dad and this lady haggling back and forth. Pretty funny stuff, but here's just a preview for you:
We walked around a lot, including a trip to the park with the view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the lake (the first picture in this part), did a lot of shopping for crafts, I took pictures of the tons and tons of flowers in bloom, etc.
We also went for a bike ride to a nearby town on wonky, ill-fitting bikes. I took a video, which probably shouldn't have taken, considering I have a terrible sense of balance. I'm having a hard time uploading it, so I'll give you this instead.
Onto Kunming. It's the capital of Yunnan, and it, too, has changed a lot since I was last there. My memory of it is as a remarkably clean, quirky, a little bit edgy big city, the cleanliness and edginess setting it apart from other big cities like Shanghai and Beijing. Well, the cleanliness has changed, probably the product of people getting richer and getting cars. It's still a pretty interesting place, with some cool aspects of the skyline.
Our first stop was People's Park, where homies were getting down to ethnic Uighur music.
We went to an awesome temple that had architectural examples of Thai, Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhism. It also had loads of turtles hanging out in the almost frighteningly green water.
Finally, we went to the Kunming Zoo. A rather depressing place in that the animals were mostly behind fences and lying or standing around on pavement, rather than in the relatively luxurious faux habitats of, say, the Bronx Zoo. However, the surroundings did not seem to bother a certain sexy kangaroo.
In the next and final post (coming soon, I promise): the garden city of Suzhou and the walled former capital, Nanjing. In the meantime, pics are still here.
