der weg ist das ziel

I always tell myself I should try something new, or order things of which I have no idea what they'll be. At a restaurant in Beijing I got corn from a can with pine nuts. My green tea latte turned out to be liquid spinach. My "fried sticky rice with eight stuffs" was an extremely sugary dessert (I had ordered it as a main course...) and I did not try the mock meat turtle as I thought that would be just too macabre... And my cocktail tasted of mint toothpaste. My Ginger tea was full of tiny red chillies, a tad too spicy for me... But I will not let these things get me down. I'm sure that one of these times my random ordering will be rewarded! :-)

and now for a tale of ultra-bargaining:
We were at a clothing market and I saw a really pretty blouse. I tried it on, then asked about the price. The sales woman showed me 860 yuan on her calculator (86 euros!!), then started asking me how much I would pay. I know that bargaining is necessary (although I didn't bargain when I bought ten pairs of chopsticks for 30 cents), but obviously there was no way I could afford this blouse, so I tried to carefully get it off me, while the sales woman kept shoving the calculator in my face asking what my price is. Finally we typed in 100 yuan, knowing that there was no way we cold pay more than 150, with that already stretching our budget. She said that it's good quality silk, and its more expensive, and went down to about 750 yuan. she asked what our best price is, so we said 150, no more, we're students, we can't afford it, while I finally got headway on getting off the blouse. She went down to about 500, and as we were getting ready to leave to 250. When we did leave she said okay, 150 yuan (15 euros). So I got a fancy chinese blouse, and was in awe of that ridiculous bargaining. Well, leaving really does work...

and a tale of homocide fantasies:
The train to Kunming took 48 hours. We were in a cramped 6-bed compartment, us being the only westerners on the entire train. So one of the guys starts tralking to us, asking us where we're from, how long we're staying in China, needing weeks to say one sentence. But he was making an effort, so okay. When I was reading, he kept interupting me, asking how long we're in China three times, and if he could "make friends with me", handing me a businesscard. After he stopped talking to me because he didn't know any more english, he just stared at me. When he wasn't staring at me he was straring at Coco.
Being stared at in Asia is nothing new to me. It's cute when kids do it and giggle when you reply to their "hello" or "ni hao." But this guy actually spent hours staring at us. When we started playing cards it seemed as though he were watching a highly interesting documentary on TV. He leaned over our cards to stare at them, fascinated. All the while he looked like a sulking teenager. Well, by the end of the 48 hours we were both ready to kill him. Especially when he tried helping us get on our backpacks. We felt like screaming in his face "dude, we don't need your help! guess what, we've been traveling for a while now and can manage on our own, and you, the guy we've wanted to beat up the last to days, are just in our way, so fuck off!" Well, didn't wod it quite that way, but asked him (as nicely as we managed) to please get out of the way.

Anyways, Kunming is a small chinese city (only 1 million inhabitants) and I've seen blue skies here again! In Beijing we never say the sky, only a sun glowing eerily through the smog...

I'm really glad we're leaving this city on Saturday... Beijing is a lot more remiscent of the USA than any former socialist country I've been to... The fancy shopping malls are just too much for me. I know to expect them in places like New York, but this is China ruled by a supposedly communist party... Plus there's more Nike and Addidas stores here than Starbucks (which is omnipresent enough)...
We're off to Kunming on Saturday, 47 hours trainride :-) Kunming, a very small city of only 1 million inhabitants, should be a calm place after this...

You just don't expect a McDonald's and Starbucks at every corner when you come to a country that's ruled by a communist party. But you have KaDeWe-esque Shopping Malls everywhere. Very interesting indeed...
It's also strange to see so many westerners now - in Mongolia it was quite the unusual occasion to run into a non-Mogolian... But we did have lunch in a restaurant catering mainly to Chinese people. Quite an strange expeirence as well: a boy (about 11 years old) greets us and asks us "for two?" - all the time he seemed like the chief waiter in the place... But then again, our waitress didn't speak any english, so our phrase book came in handy :-)
By the way: as you might have noticed, I don't really write that much; of the two of us, Coco is the closet travel book author, so if you want to read more: http://rose.travellerspoint.com :-)