China: Day 3, Part 2 - On Aimless Walking

China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.
- Charles de Gaulle

We were shocked when we walked onto the streets of Dali. We had imagined China to be like India, except with Mongloid features dominating the landscape. Well, we were at least right about the Mongloid bit.

Empty cobblestone streets

The town was beautiful. Comparable to most European towns, except with more interesting food. The Cangshang mountains towered over the entire town, snow-peaked and misty. The streets were clean, the roads were paved, and the houses lined in perfection. It was an urban planner's paradise.
The city is a new old town, and you can now see new and renovated "old" buildings and walk down cobblestone streets with views of the ancient (but renovated?) city gates.

We strapped on our shoes, and marched on bravely with a map, and an Android App with a few unpronounceable Mandarin words for support. The first thing we encountered were friendly Chinese. It was an observation we would make again and again - the Chinese in China are really helpful, and really apologetic if they are unable to help, even though they couldn't understand a word of what we said. Sign language, random sounds, and oddly enough words of Hindi that no one understood, got us through the city.

We took a while to figure out
that these were dustbins

A Local Buddhist Temple

Some buildings (the richer ones?) had sloping roofs with a sweeping curvature that rose at the corners, while the others had simple inclined roofs. Most houses were similar, line-after-line of cloned masonry, adorned by beautiful art. There was beauty in the midst of the conformity. Structured poetry.

We also encountered Dali food. It was for the main part skewers. A lot of it. Of everything. It is something the Dali-ians seem to enjoy more than anything else. Over our stay there, we found a lot of them - bananas, potatoes, tomatoes, all kinds of known meat, all kinds of unknown meat, green vegetables, etc. There is a sizeable Muslim population on Dali Old Town, and we found shops that exclusively sold skewers - halal meat cooked in a definite Arabic style.

We wandered the streets with with our maps shoved into the faces of willing Chinese, and found most of the streets quaint and beautiful, until we reached the central street - Fuxing Street that runs from the North Gate to the South Gate. Like old cities, this city has gates. Large ones. The Cangshang mountains are towards the West Gate and the Erhai Lake is towards the East Gate. The entire town gently slopes from the west to east. This allows for some of the most delightful waterways of pure spring water which the people use for all their daily needs.

On Fuxing street we finally saw the people. And the Chinese people were delightful. With their love for pop music and high heels, and their hordes of photogenic Chinese kids. This street intersected with the Foreigner's street, which oddly enough contained only Chinese domestic tourists and tour groups. The parallel Renming street held all the real foreigners - many of them dreadlocked white males, Goth Chinese girls, and hippie cafes that could have existed in any corner of the world. This was the least Chinese place in all of Dali, a backpacker's paradise. The perfect place for a nice English breakfast. In China. Ugh.

8 pm. Late by Dali standards, we decided to find ourselves dinner in the many grocery stores/restaurants that line the waterways. These stores sold fresh vegetables and fish/bugs/other crawling creatures and cooked quick food for anyone who could communicate with them. And this is where lay our problem.

We took a chance with one of the eateries. In the midst of their fascination with us exotic Indians, P's angular nose and henna, we blundered our way into ordering large quantities of food. We do not know what we had, but it was tasty and spicy. And we ate it, runny nosed and sweaty, watched by the curious Chinese owner and her family who tried their best to be as nice as they could possibly be.

And thus the day did end. We had met the Chinese. On their own turf. And no one had ripped us off. So far.