Haiyi Hotel Lanzhou

... a café in the airport drinking a cup of very expensive and not so tasty cup of coffee passing the time until my flight by writing and watching They Kissed Again (Taiwanese soap) on a very snowy TV provided for free by Hisense (not exactly a good promotion). Less nervous now, just exhausted. This is despite news from Mum saying that military presence at the airport in Urumqi and in the city is insane. Plus a lot of tours and things have been cancelled in Xinjiang and foreign reporters ...

... line, racing to keep up with New Year's demand for, count 'em, 33 kinds of dumplings. "They get calluses on their fingers from making so many dumplings," Huang says. I ask in my most polite Mandarin but am denied entrance to the inner sanctum. Too busy, they say. But would you want a hulking, bushy-bearded foreigner running roughshod through your dumpling operation? Sated - at least for a few hours - I bundle up in a ...

... The evening turned into a very cold night with cold wind blowing through town..reminded me of being in the snowfields.. DAY 140 " Snowflakes and ice.." - Tianzhou to Lanzhou (150km) It felt like I was in th snowfields, well I was right, overnight it snowed and in the morning the snow flakes were still coming down. It looked beautiful though, a white cover across Tianzhou (makes any town look so much nicer) and the mountains ...

... everywhere so we chose the quite and not too commercial town to spend a night. We thought we were so smart and made a great choice until we get to the town. We entered the town around 7 O'Clock evening and found the town is very quite, actually it was too quite, we hardly can see any people or hotel. There were very few people were hanging out the street; I found one guest house but it's was very dark and looked very uncomfortable to me ...

... of the action in the Youyi Hotel which is just across the valley from the Living Buddha Temple and right next to the mountains main car/bus park and cable car station. Oh yeah, when I wrote 'action' I was trying to be funny. Leave your hotel after dark and there is no way of finding your way back. It is dark out there.....very very dark.....I nearly got lost ...

June 23 marked my last night in Shaowu and included a hilarious dinner at "Orange" (owned and run by Yan's relatives) with Shane, Rob, Candy, Joyce, Jackie and Jackie's "sister" (in Canada we would call them "cousins"). Tonight it seemed as though my Chinese friends were really starting to get our innuendos and not-so-subtle puns! It's been said that one's knowledge of a second language is really not complete ...

... many, and the children at my school did their small part by bringing toys and books from home to sell in a massive yard sale. It was a touching sight - some of the toys were items which we as Canadians would have tossed into the garbage long ago. Compared to Canadians the children here have few toys. Many families have no hot water and most have no heat. Toys are not a priority. Yes, the media was here to report on and take photographs of the fund raising ...

... have begun to mobilize, and I hastened back to train on our side of the vehicle to pass, cross landslides areas, bus-off thriller comparison, reversing a two-adjusted return would be passed. Train journey, visit soon, from the red to the other side of the bridge closed, the red flag to see the bridge not far from the road diversions, road repair to go upward. To bypass the Bay, near here saw as a serious mountain landslides ...

... amazed by the contrasts I come across in China. After trying numerous phones and being unable to reach either my insurance company or any other useful person, I got in a taxi and asked them to take me to a hospital. The hospital was green, and had lots of signs, all of which were in chinese, except the one that said, helpfully, chinese traditional medicine department. 'I've been bitten by a dog' isn't in my phrase book, nor is bite, so we had another watch-the-westerner-in-bemusement ...

... with a 2m high wall of mud, and no features on the outside wall apart from a single door (and maybe the odd sattelite dish sticking out...). Looked a little bit like the housing near Zhongdian. Very into their fences these people - the countryside is littered with waist-high mud walls surrounding empty fields. Strange, considering how friendly they seem. The area also has a strong ...