[Rick Lee]

China is dirt, dirt cheap if you know how to do it. Even if you get robbed, it's not that expensive. I have no interest in Shanghai or Beijing. We have big modern cities too. The stuff I want to see is either in the interior or a little off the beaten path. Chongqing is one of the largest cities in the world, bigger than Cairo or Mexico City, around 30 million people. But because it's its own province, it's not really called the biggest city in the world. It's as hilly as San Fran., so the wild thing is that there are no bicycles there. Unlike Americans, Chinese use bikes strictly for transportation, not leisure. Guilin and Lijiang are sort of touristy, but are small, very well preserved towns, just gorgeous. Kunming is on my list next time, near the Vietnamese border. I also spent a few days living in a Tibetan village way out in NW Sichuan Province. Chengdu is by far my favorite city there. A city of 6-7 million is considered a small one in China. Chengdu is the spicy food capital of the world and probably as well known for its drop dead gorgeous women, not to mention the huge Panda zoo there. Guangzhou is the most prosperous city in China and is also a world food capital, though Cantonese is not as spicy as Sichuanese. Cantonese is an impossible language. It makes Mandarin look like Spanish in the difficulty level.

Taxis are super cheap in China. Crossing the street in most cities is very dangerous. I'm not exaggerating. I'd rather hold targets at the rifle range. Two kinds fo countries in the world - those where people stop for cars and those where cars stop for people. China is the former, the US is the latter. Domestic flights are pretty cheap too, but you can almost only buy them for cash, no credit cards. Most are around $100 and you can just show up and buy tickets at the airport. If you take a boat ride down the Yangtze, try very hard to get on a Chinese boat and don't get forced onto one for foreign tourists. Best bet is to go on China Daily's BBS and find some English speaking student to take you around, you pay for their meals and travel and they make sure you don't get screwed everywhere, as you otherwise will. You can consider yourself a very good shopper if you get away only paying what locals pay. I can do that now, but needed help the first time I was there. No price is ever firm.

Go get a foot massage every single night you're in China. Some of them are $5 for 90 min. of pure heaven. Oh, I miss than more than anything else. Most girls who work there are kids from the countryside and are treated worse than blacks ever were before the civil rights movement here. They make maybe $100 a month and are always very happy to have a westerner smile and be nice to them. No tipping in China. They will be refused everywhere except in some hotels and with some taxi drivers (who don't already screw you over.)