I've had a few moments of confusion in China, mostly because my mandarin totally sucks. One of these was getting to the bus station to find no sign of any English. In the end got helped by one of the few people who speak English. I was suspicious of course - you tend not to trust locals who speak English and want to come up and talk to you when you are travelling - but he was quite helpful and when I asked if he wanted any cash for helping he said no. Another example of not getting ripped off in China...
The best moment of confusion for me was buying some bread. I went into a small shop selling unleavened bread, cooked with chives (I think) and still warm. I asked for a slice (a lot of pointing) and for the price he showed me 2 fingers, then 5. So I think $2.50, right? Right. So I give him a $5 note. No, not enough! Wtf? Is he saying $25 for some bread?? Surely not. Hmm, so instead of handing over a $100 note, I put a few coins on my hand and he takes 2 of them. So 2 fingers plus 5 fingers equals $7! What a weird way of showing a 7!
I felt like I had been ripped off because he seemed to change the price - I was so sure he had meant $2.50, and $7 seemed pretty expensive for that bread, but it was delicious so I didn't worry.
Delicious enough for me to return the next day, and instead of the old guy, I got the old woman (his wife I guess), serving me. This time I bought four times the amount of bread, including different types of loaves. These are quite small, round loaves, some savoury, some sweet - and you don't know which until you buy and eat them ;) And guess what the price was again? $7!! So, he must have ripped me off!!
I left, shaking my head, but again, all so cheap it wasn't a big deal.
But then! Later that day I bought a can of coke for $4.50. I handed over the $5 note and I received 50 cents change...but instead of getting a 50 cent coin as I was expecting, I got a 50 cent NOTE!!! WTF??? So then it dawned on me. That $5 note I had offered the old guy in the first place, was a 50 cent note!! The price was $2.50 all along, and he hadn't ripped me off! I had just been very confused :D
I stopped a night in Jinghong (after a 9 hour bus ride down from Kunming), intending to cross the border into Laos.
First of all, there are NO more flights from Jinghong out of China - you have to fly from Kunming if you want to leave China. Ok, I found that out the hard way.
Next, the thing they - being both guide books and the genuinely helpful dude (Alex) in Banna (not Banana unfortunately) cafe - say is, to cross to Laos, take a bus to Mengla (somehow pronounced mulla, weird), stay the night there, get up early and get a bus that goes through Mohan (the border) and onto Luang Namtha. But I decided that was a night I didn't want to waste in Mengla (according to the guide book, super boring, and it looked it), so I got a bus from Mengla straight to Mohan (about 1 hour, but lots of stopping), and then just jumped out of the bus, exited through Chinese customs, and got a tuktuk to Laos customs. You can buy a visa there (looks like it's a pretty permanent thing, but who knows with Laos).
On the Laos side, things turned shit for me (see next post). Do NOT pay 200RMB to get a shit tuktuk to Luang Namtha - it's too much money.
Oh, I had my first chicken on a bus experience. Surprisingly it was China and not Laos. It was on the quite nice bus from Jinghong to Mengla. We stopped in the middle of nowhere and these really brown Chinese people got on with bags of vegetables and a live chicken (soon to be eaten I suspect, after they got off...).