Ruili, Chinese food, and toilets

It was another 6 hour bus ride to Ruili. Actually, it was listed as 6 but it only took 5 because my bus driver was a speed demon. He looked about 20 years old, wore his shirt wide open, and chain smoked. But I felt pretty safe in his hands. This bus was not like the others I've been on. It was more of a mini-bus, a rickety thing with only 18 seats. My seat was right up in the passenger seat next to the driver.

I just realized that I have been in China over three weeks and have hardly mentioned the food here. Shame on me. Chinese cuisine is, after all, one of the world's greatest. I admit that I'd felt some trepidation before I arrived. I knew Chinese food in China wouldn't be the same as the Chinese food I know and love back home. But I must say I've been pleasantly surprised. Yes, there are a lot of items on the menu here that I prefer to avoid (usually involving animal organs). But it's not difficult to avoid them. In cities with foreign tourists, restaurants often have English menus. Or they have menus with pictures that you can point to. These menus are often several dozen pages long because of all the pictures.

But once you get away from the large cities and main tourist centers, you’ll inevitably come up against restaurants without any menus at all, Chinese or English. Street food is one option, and has the added advantage that you can see what is being offered before your eyes. Some typical examples of street food are:

*skewers of meat or vegetables - they are fresh and raw and you pick the ones you want and they grill them right in front of you

*noodle soup - pretty basic, you pick the noodles and the vegetables/meats you want, and they cook it

*stir-fry - they have containers full of various vegetables, meats, herbs, and spices - point to the ones you want

*or more elaborate, pre-prepared dishes - choose the ones you want - served over rice

A meal at a street stall never costs more than $1. Often times it costs well under (noodle soup is usually 25 cents)

But I've been in China for over three weeks and have yet to get sick. (Knock on wood).

Back to the trip. I'm in Ruili now. This is the "wild west" of Yunnan province. We're right next to the border with Burma. In fact, I took a taxi 20 km distance this afternoon just to see the border. Not a whole lot to see. Knowing that the border was on a bridge, I was expecting something impressive. But the "bridge" was a pitiful little thing over a dinky little creek. I saw a few vehicles and pedestrians cross. Didn't seem to be very heavily guarded or armed. In fact, it looked like the whole border crossing was manned by one female soldier. (Can a border crossing be "manned" by a woman?) From what I could see across the bridge, Burma didn't look all that different. Just as this spot is the boonies of China, this is also the boonies of Burma. In fact, this northern section of Burma is a hotbed of rebel activity. As you probably know, Burma is one of the world's most repressive countries. And in this mountainous region, ethnic minorities have been waging a resistance movement for decades.

In Tengchong I had met a botanist from UC Berkeley who warned me that rebel activity in Burma had heated up in just the last week and that he had problems getting access to certain areas near Ruili in order to collect plant specimens. He warned me that I may get turned away at a checkpoint on the way to Ruili. I didn't encounter any problems at all.

Ruili used to be one of the seediest border towns in China. A lot of heroin apparently passes across the border near here. Burma is one of the world's great producers of heroin, and China is, unfortunately, experiencing growing demand for the drug. Recent crackdowns by the police, however, have shifted some of the smuggling from Ruili to the more remote Irawaddy River (which my bus route paralleled for about 100km today).

But if Ruili is still a center of sin and vice, it sure doesn't look it. In fact, it looks more like Los Angeles, or Pasadena, or San Diego. Really. The boulevards are wide and lined with palm trees. The commercial architecture (and there's a lot of it; this town is one big mall) is bright and colorful and varied.

Here in Ruili there is clearly a lot of influence from Burma. There is a sizable Burmese minority here. Many wear sarongs.

I found a whole street selling solar heating equipment - solar water heaters, photovoltaic cells, and the like.

On my taxi/minibus ride to the border, the driver circled around first, saying hello to his friends, stopping to buy cigarettes, and filling up on gas. The gas station attendants are cute girls in pink shirts and jeans. That’s something you don’t see everyday. The minibuses only go if they have enough passengers to make the trip profitable. Or if it's just one passenger, you pay extra. I didn't want to pay extra and was willing to wait, but the driver seemed exasperated with me, and I'm pretty sure she was telling her friend how cheap I was.

Come nighttime, I followed the crowds of young people, culminating in my discovery of a bustling public plaza. A series of lakes and ponds the size of several city blocks, traversed by pedestrian walkways and bridges lit by lanterns and crowded with Chinese and Burmese teenagers smoking, drinking, flirting, and doing what teenagers everywhere do. There was also a night market, food stalls, juice bars, carnival games, arcade games, plenty of neon ligths, and a roller skating rink over the lake. Needless to say, I was impressed. Not only do you find restaurants, nightclubs, and bars open late. It seems like almost every retail establishment stays open late as well. Clothing stores, electronics stores, shoe stores, beauty salons, travel agencies, everything. I'm walking around at 10pm, 11pm, and everything is open. People are out and about all over the city - playing cards, drinking, hanging out. Adults, kids, old people, dogs, cats, chickens.

One explanation might be I’m on the edge of Western China here in Yunnan. All of China is on "Beijing time" even though most of the country is west of Beijing. So the sun stays up later. To compensate for the irregular time patterns, businesses might open later in the morning, and stay open later in the evening. But that still doesn't explain why things are still open at 11pm, well after the sun has set. I think the Chinese are just night people.

There are no foreigner-geared youth hostels here, so I splurged and am staying at a "nice" hotel. Sixty yuan ($7.50) gets me a nice private room with hardwood floors, tea, bottled water, bathroom, a/c, a bowl of condoms (apparently a government-sponsored initiative to combat HIV), and TV. The TV even gets an English language channel, so I've been watching my first TV in China. It's actually quite good. It's called CCTV-9 and it's China's only English language channel. It has news, sports, and programs on science, technology, business, entertainment. The TV personalities are both English-speaking Chinese and Hong Kongers, and Americans and Europeans. Pretty cool gig. I was able to catch up on my news, which has been difficult in China since very few newsstands stock the English language "China Daily".

My second day in Ruili, I went for a long walk. At first the road was a long, mostly empty boulevard lined with restaurants. It was all very spread out and not very walkable, so I figured this was where middle class Ruilians with vehicles dine out. Several female door-greeters in cheongsams (the body-hugging, one-piece traditional garment of women in China) grew animated when I passed by and tried to coax me into their restaurants. The restaurants looked awfully nice - variations on the bamboo hut theme, just like you'd find in a Western tourist enclave. But this isn't a Western tourist enclave. At the end of the road I found a temple complex and grounds. The temple was fashioned in the same style as much of the commercial architecture around here: gaudy, postmodern, with abstract geometric shapes. Then I came to a river, crossed it, and found myself in another town, with more wide boulevards lined with palm trees and shops selling everything under the sun. I then found another border crossing with  Burma. Turns out I didn't have to take that long cab ride yesterday; there are two border crossings, and this one was within walking distance. Oh well, now I've seen both. This one was more substantial, but people still seemed to be passing freely back and forth. I saw lots of Burmese folks in this area. A lot of them seem to cross the border just to go shopping, kind of like Mexicans do in U.S. border towns. Some of them also seem to be offering their services doing labor for Chinese who want them (also like Mexicans in the U.S).

And now, something about toilets: China and India both use squat toilets instead of seat toilets, but there's one big difference between Chinese and Indian toilet practices. Indians shun toilet paper. They consider the notion vile and reprehensible. Instead, there's a little spigot of water next to every Indian toilet, and you're supposed to splash some water to clean yourself. Always with your left hand, which is considered the dirty hand. But the Chinese have developed a taste for toilet paper. They use it just like we do. That's not to say you can always expect to find it in the toilet, though. BYOTP is the name of the game. But all the stores carry it. Depending on where you are, Chinese toilets can leave something to be desired. In places like public bathrooms or bus station pit stops, you'll find Chinese men or women squatting in a row, going to the bathroom in full public view, often with not so much as even dividers between them.