Changxing Hotel Lanzhou

... had been pulled from their cars and beaten to death. That I should not go out at night and only go out in the daytime in company. That I should be careful. He wished me the best of luck, then left. I looked out the window at the sun setting over the desert. Tears started to roll down my face again. For all that I was scared, I don't think they were tears of self-pity. More of shock, to hear a personal account of something that I would otherwise only come across in the news. Of shame ...

... a bit. The dining hall at our foreigners' compound made Dumplingfest a Sunday staple, and I'd go for lunch and eat 40 of them. Then, for dinner, they'd pan-fry 'em to make sure they all got used. I ate 40 more, appreciative of the increased oil quotient against the biting Beijing cold. In those days, Beijing dumplings were a special occasion. Families whose entire home was a single room gathered in communal cinderblock ...

... Chinese translators but lets not go there. I somehow managed to explain it to the man in the shop and even got him to change my chain, brake cables and brake paths. Amazing what you can do by pointing, making sounds and handing them my spare parts. It looked like they initially were breaking my bike rather than fixing it, but after a handshake, not havng to pay a thing (i brought all the spare parts), I cycled off with my almost brand new bike...

... that you can't actually think of anything you would change! I woke to what I thought was someone trying to force the schools loud speaker system up my.....into my ear! After remembering it was Teachers Day I stopped thinking there was a fire in the building and started the day with a coffee. Of course it wasn't until I was just about to head out the door and race to class that somebody thought to ...

... name of 'park in the clouds'. Throughout the year the climate is spectacular, the view is respectively different. In spring the wild flower is brilliant, the Indian azalea, the flowering plant, the golden chrysanthemums dresses up the Jigong especially beautiful. In the summer the climate is cool, the average temperature is 24 degrees. Some people describe ...

... next destination direct, I just tried to get as close as I could instead. The next stop provided a barrier that was always overcome. Bus from Lingji to Longsheng, then to Sanjiang. Taxi 16kms to train station sleeper train to Huahua arriving midnight. Taxi-bus to Fenghaung, arrive final destination 3.30am. Managed a direct route after all! The drive was not so bad though. As well as the stunning scenery I ...

... of my favorite places to visit was the Sojhou's Silk Factory. Sojhou is known for it's beautiful girls and silk, and it was very nice to visit the factory and to see how silk is made. We did a strength on one of the primary stages of how to make silk to see how strong the silk was. Believe me, silk is very strong. I learned that the best way to know whether a silk is real or not is by burning it. We burnt two blouses ...

... aging transmission belt has been broken, Very good! And vehicle spare parts have not. Began to drop anchor, and then up two passenger cars, are just now when landslides blocked with the vehicles, drivers who are eager to help, for the use of an old drive belt (with nails nailed together for some kind of paragraph), the driver barely crank up again, but to open soon, another stop on the repair, the open stop always open is not ...

... them 'rabies' in the phrase book (that hadn't worked in the hospital either), they made a couple of calls, wrote something on a bit of paper, and put me in a taxi. It eventually dropped me at the quarantine department of the Chinese government, where they spoke english, understood instantly the necessity for a rabies jag, and had it sorted out in about an hour. In addition to that, the guy who I dealt with at the quarantine department phoned ahead to Chengdu, wrote out an explanation in ...

... temples (helped by brilliant blue-sky days). The monks are friendly, although they speak almost no English. Embarrassed the entirity of the western world with my ping-pong skills, playing some 4th-year monks in Xiahe. We've discovered in our travels that monks, far from being holy figures that transcend our materialistic world, are incredibly normal. They're more like western ...