February 5, 2008
Jinghong: Getting acquainted
First thing today is to find an ATM that will accept our card and give us Chinese money so we can settle our debts. The hotel gets its 100 yuan back, we pay for two nights and they return our 100 $. The hotel is very good value, by the way, at 16 Euros for the room, but on Chinese New Year it goes up to 30.
Today we cycle around to get a feeling for the town. Yesterday's first impressions are confirmed: It's a lovely city with palm-lined avenues, light traffic, broad bike lanes and wide, uncrowded sidewalks. Temperatures are ideal, it's sunny and the air is dry. The town is decorated with red lanterns and banners and the stores are full of them in preparation for Chinese New Year, giving the town a festive atmosphere. Mainly we walk and ride around town, taking it all in.
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We aren't seeing many places to eat yet, quite different from Thailand where there are food stands every few meters. We start the day with coffee and French toast at a backpacker's hang-out, have lunch in a little place where they obligingly bring what they think we might like since I don't know what anything is called - a tasty vegetable and meat dish with rice. In the evening we find a place called Over-the Bridge-Noodles. They have an English menu, but the names mean nothing to us, we have no idea what we will get. It's a GIANT bowl of broth and little bowls with many things to dump in, some of which I recognize like mushrooms, a leg of chicken, parsley and noodles of course, and then many unknowns. None of it tastes too startlingly different from other soups we have had, and we leave with full bellies.
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