Fuddland
Perhaps due to its location—fairly far removed from other famous tourist destinations or ports of trade [as well as it being in one of the poorer provinces in China]—while the local government seems to have gone some way towards designating certain areas to be of interest to tourists, the old streets and buildings of Bozhou that are in the traditional Chinese style are still plentiful in number mostly because they are still functional: people still live and work in and around them.
Wherever we went, on the street outside shops or walking down dusty side streets, glancing into open doors, we saw game after game of mahjong being played—it reminded me a lot of what I saw in Chengdu, although at least most of these people seemed to be at their actual places of work not working, rather than hanging out in the park all day not working. The general aura of a relaxed attitude to life may or not be related to Bozhou being the hometown of the founder of Daoism [aka Taoism], Laozi [aka Laosi, Lao Tse, Lao-Tzu, Laotze, and Laocius].
Every evening we were there we ate out at a sprawling food court just across the road from our hotel. At around four or five in the afternoon, dozens of tables and plastic stools are set out beneath an old marquee, with several different proprietors offering an enormous variety of dishes cooked before your very eyes. Since we didn’t really know any names of the local dishes that we could order, and even if we were told the names we wouldn’t know what it was, we settled on a much more convenient method of ordering: we simply chose the ingredients and asked to be made a tasty dish using them.
This sort of Chinese fare tends to use only one or two vegetable and meat components, given its pep with spices, garlic and sauces, so it’s quite easy to choose, say, a nice-looking aubergine and get served a huge plate of it flavoured with some sort of thick gravy-like sauce that you’ve never tasted before, but is nonetheless delicious. And of course there are staples like steamed dumplings, rice, and some sort of thick, tapioca-like soup with soy beans that seemed to be a local speciality to fill you up.
There were a few other parks and temples that we didn’t go and check out, but I think we saw the lion’s share of what Bozhou has to offer, and it was well worth the trip. The people were friendly and not overly-curious, even though we were the only foreigners we saw the entire time we were there. The only embarrassing “special treatment” we received was at the train station trying to buy our tickets home. As we were queuing, with a good twenty or thirty people in front of us, a new window was opened and we were beckoned forward. I was half-expecting to be spoken to in English, but [as with every other local that we interacted with in Bozhou] the attendant didn’t seem to know anything beyond, “Hello”. I felt quite awkward being allowed to buy our tickets ahead of all the other people waiting in line, but I expect politely refusing the service and re-joining the queue would have created great confusion [as well as unintended offense], and it was nice to be able to secure sleeper tickets for the ten-hour or so train ride back to Suzhou.
