Tianyuan 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 ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... 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.

... local store in every second or third one. Each village has between ten and twenty houses (some even less) and all are set beneath beautiful mountains. On this ride today I pretty much stayed on the one small road and must have passed though about twenty or so of them. Now when you think of the extent of the Sichuan ...

... front row of the truck drivers will be back to a safe distance from the car, blindfolded canvas before the windowsÑÏʵcover glass and body, to prevent the explosion when he was hit by rubble. I hold the camera in the high ground, such as a long time, wanted to make blast scene, but no movement, and so many people can not, go check on the situation, when a large number of people to the front Wai, I also came to carefully guard ...

... 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 ...