Mengla

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  Mengla, China
Thursday, February 15, 2007

A bus trip to China's border town of Mengla was a necessary step before crossing into Laos. We were greeted through the windows of the bus by a group of tourist vultures with claims of the best exchange rate for Lao Kip and the cheapest rooms in the area. Many of these people were proprietors of nearby hotels and guesthouses; their fulltime job is to round up travelers at the bus station who don't know where they are or where to go. By this time in our travels we had grown quite wary of these types and instead chose to find a hotel on our own. This proved to be no easy task. Many of the hotels were intended for traveling businessmen, who could afford to spend a little more than we were used to. The ones we could afford looked like they hadn't been cleaned since the last residents had been there, whether it was the night before or two years back. Even with the owner's bribery of candy we couldn't bring ourselves to stay.
Scouring the city for hotels made it painfully clear that prostitution ran rampant in Mengla. The streets seemed to follow a disturbing pattern of businesses: cell phone store, brothel, hotel, healthcare center, and restaurant, repeat. If that wasn't evidence enough, the free condoms and pornographic tiles in our bathroom sealed the deal.
After checking in to a clean, but sketchy hotel we took a few hours to explore the city individually. Even with a great group of people like we had, it's good to have some alone time now and then. I found nothing of interest on my walk. Some cute kids, pool halls and wet markets, but nothing that any other Chinese city didn't offer (although the preffered method of smoking in southern China appears to be through a bong rather than a cigarette).
We reconvened and looked for a place to eat dinner. The first restaurant blatantly tried to rip us off, by quoting us prices that were double what was printed on the menu. They knew we were tourists and tried to take advantage of us. So after making a small scene, we got up and went across the street. We ate a simple dinner and were joined by "Joking Jackie", the friend of the restaurant owner's son. Conversation didn't stray far from the normal conversation topics we generally cover when talking to Chinese people, but he was a nice enough kid.
After dinner we walked back to the hotel and decided to look for a DVD to watch before we went to bed (Lance had his laptop with him on the trip). The DVD stores in Mengla seemed to be a little behind the times and nothing looked particularly appealing to us, I did however manage to find a hilarious looking CD called 'The Monsters Project 2002' which I couldn't avoid buying.
We called it an early night and went back to the hotel room and watched a few episodes of the 'The Office' (the American version, which has since overcome my overwhelming prejudice and won me over) before getting into bed. The sooner we fell asleep the earlier we could wake up and leave Mengla behind us.

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