Noodles!

After Urumqi we journeyed to the home of hand pulled noodles: Lanzhou.  Actually, it wasn't quite so simple.  We had an unplanned, very lengthy delay.  We cabbed it to the airport to catch our flight, both horrified and relieved that the regular cab fare was half what we had paid to get taken into town (cabs that don't turn on the meter always turn out badly).  Taxi rides in China are never straightforward.  There is always something unexpected happening, and our not being able to speak Chinese inevitably just makes things more of a mess.  This cabdriver actually hadn't started the meter at first, but about a block in I pointed this out to him and he dutifully flipped it on.  Then halfway to the airport he started chatting with us, and was quite firm about wanting to know when our plane was due to leave.  I still wasn't sure that he wasn't going to try driving us all over town, and at that point we had already passed the landmarks by which I had known we were going in the right direction, so I told him 2:00 (I think we had a 2:45 departure).  He pulled over almost immediately at a gas station off the highway saying he would just be a minute or two.  Maybe he had been explaining this to us the whole time?  Was this what we had been chatting about?  Wasn't the taxi meter running?  Well, it didn't matter in the end - was the gas station closed?  out of gas?  it was noon, after all - neither of these things seemed very likely, but after a quick shouted exchange between the cabdriver and a gas station attendant we drove off without having even fully stopped moving.  The airport, of course, presented more problems.  Though we knew our airline (Air China), we did not know the Chinese for our airline (still don't), and couldn't answer simple questions about which terminal we were flying out of.  We had no idea!  Luckily, the driver was redeeming his non-meter-starting character, and took pity on us.  Between the three of us, we were able to ask around until we made it to the right terminal.  Finally at the right place we checked into our flight only to find that it had been delayed 6 hours.  Boozh!  The Urumqi airport entertainment options are slim to none: one magazine/snack stand and a single coffee shop that looked like it had instant coffee and a jug of hot water.  Chairs?  2.  Occupied.  Uncomfortable window seating?  Also occupied.  We debated our options, and settled on taking the bus back into town for the day.  And the plan worked!  Urumqi was great the second time around!  We had yet another pilaf lunch (our third in three days), and settled in at a coffee shop to wait out the afternoon.  It was on the free coffee shop internet that we discovered that our plane had been delayed yet again, sending us to our favorite night market for dinner (kebabs and noodles) before we nabbed our second cab of the day and, at just before midnight, found ourselves on a plane and headed to Lanzhou.

Unfortunately, the delayed flight meant that our time in Lanzhou would be significantly shortened.  We did manage to find great noodles, another fun night market and a bad Xinjiang restaurant (you can see Ann was missing Urumqi already).

This is the "chocolate" that I (Ann) bought on the way home from our exploration of the Lanzhou night market.  I was mainly attracted to it by the fact that it seemed to represent chocolate (Enõn!) and that it was cheap (3 kuai).  Unfortunately, the texture more closely resembled crumbling cement and I decided that it would probably better serve society structurally.  In a trash pile.

Seeing these pictures I realize that we both look tired.  We can attribute this two causes.  One:  we didn't get to our hotel until 3am the night before.  The airport is over an hour outside of town, and we made this trip in the middle of the night.  Actually, we weren't even the only ones in the hotel lobby when we got there - on the seventh floor of our hotel (and you could hear the music in the elevator as it rolled by) there was a KTV place, and a gaggle of girls fluttered out as we walked in.  But reason Two:  we booked a hotel right next to the train depot.  We knew there were train noises, we had read the hotel reviews mentioning them.  But we foolishly thought that we could sleep through it.  Wrong.  You know that dinging noise that a train crossing makes?  Well, we heard that.  All night.  Along with really loud train horns.  I'm left with a profound respect for the hobos who sleep in train yards or train cars or along train tracks under bridges.  It's a noisy world.

Ann and Mike