Changfeng Hotel Lanzhou

... in the place it ought to have been. It didn't appear because the flight was cancelled. Bugger. Is this like some kind of plot to stop me from going to Xinjiang. Riots, cancelled flights...etc.? Is it some kind of divine hint? I'm not good at hints. The airline offered to put me on a flight with another airline instead. I agreed, then called LX to tell him the 'good' news that the flight would arrive at 9:50 at night!!! He sounded slightly flabbergasted but not too annoyed. So now I am ...

... days, considering this is supposed to be winter. The fog lifted for the afternoon and allowed us to take a few pictures of the scenery. It is very beautiful here. The mountains, the gardens and the trees are almost indescribable and the pictures just don't do them justice. The part I still struggle with in all this beauty is the garbage ...

... Dumpling King waitress No. 005, known to her friends and family as Huang Yibo. Chinese restaurant staffers tend to be identified by numbers, which can reach a dizzying six digits - a combination of the remnants of communist bureaucracy and the Chinese obsession with numerology. Huang watches as her colleagues - behind sanitary glass, of course, in keeping with the new China - toil in the dumpling version of Henry Ford's ...

... bike. Yes I must have not put the tire on probably and it had slipped of the rim, with the tube coming through...a big oops on my part, but we had to laugh out loud as it was a great "Manon" entrance....Everybody Manon has arrived....BANG!!! It had damaged my tire which needed replacing, but again not an issue as I have been carrying enough spare parts to rebuild 2 bikes I reckon so anything that I could get rid of from my luggage suits me ...

... the rain got so heavy later, we were worried that we would waste the admission ticket 70 RMB. But actually the view of the garden turned out amazingly beautiful in the rain. We just sat in one of the stand and looked at the garden in the rain. A lot people were gone at the moment, and all we could hear is the sound of rain and the nature. Not a bad experience though. At the evening we went to the Watertown. We didn't want to see the ...

... that money for a hotel? Anyhow, there was no way around it and in the end I flashed my nifty China Teaching Volunteer Badge at the beautiful reception girl at the hotel I preferred to stay in. She instantly went weak at the knees and soon I was paying nearly three hundred Yuan less than the insanely crazy price several minutes prior! So now, here I sit right in the ...

We had our lunch and then went to a village that had already started to set up their tents. It was great to see the two rows of tents in a field right beside some of the homes that had been destroyed. Lizzy and I went to every tent and showed the regional leaders the little touch ups that they need to do.

May 12, 2008, 2:28 p.m. was one of those moments which anyone living in China is unlikely to ever forget. It was the time when hundreds of thousands of peoples' lives changed forever and marks the exact moment of the worst natural disaster to hit China in over 30 years. The earthquake occurred in the poorest and most densely populated province in China, Sichuan. Although we in Shaowu are located four provinces east of the earthquake zone, the event has ...

... boosters within 24 hours, just in case. So I had to back out of the arrangement to share a car with four other folk south to Songpan, and instead get a bus to Hezuo and another one from there to Lanzhou, which is the nearest place to Langmusi with rabies vaccine. They don't stock it in Langmusi, Songpan, or anywhere else nearer than Lanzhou. It took 9hours to reach Lanzhou, and the bus dropped me at the south bus station, the opposite side of town from the main train station. I'm ...

... So there were some quite nice vistas of brown and white yak herds grazing on lush green, rolling hills, with snow covered mountains in the background. We also saw a yurt for some reason (I thought they were Mongolian?). Most of these villages didn't have a modern building in sight, instead they lived in fortress-like houses. You couldn't see any living quarters - just a square ...