There IS a God! (but he's not a Chinese butcher)

An hour later we returned to the ticket office and there was already a long queue, and it was pouring with rain. We got our tickets to Lanzhou but realised later in the day that we had forgotten to ask for the top bunk so we had been given the bottom bunk which is the most expensive and, by all accounts, the worst.

In keeping with our plan to relax a bit more, we did not rush out to do anything touristy, although our hostel was just next to the city walls and one of the city gates. Instead I did a bit of blogging.

The next day we tried to change our train tickets to the top bunk but all the trains to Xi'an that day were completely sold out, so we were very lucky. We were both starting badly running out of clothes due to wear and tear, items going missing when we do laundry, and also we anticipated needing some warmer clothes when we arrive in New Zealand. We had asked at the hostel for a cheap place to buy clothes but the market we were sent to did not seem to exists, or else it wasn't on that day, or else we had got on the wrong bus. After that we went to the cheap high street shops we had been recommended but they were all out of our price range. I don't understand how clothes made in China for sale in Primark in Glasgow can cost less than supposedly cheap shops on the Chinese high street. Eventually we returned to the hostel exhausted but empty-handed.

Our plan had been to take a short break at the hostel then head out again to the market stalls in the Muslim area, but I was so knackered I didn't think I'd be able to face going out again. We walked through the reception into a little sitting area on the way to our room and just sitting there, leaning against a table in that room was a plastic bag with the words “Free clothing! Enjoy” written on it. There is a god! We picked it up and took it back to our room for a closer look. Inside were a couple of Nepal tourist tee-shirts (“Never End Peace And Love”), one pair of North Face walking trousers (presumably Nepali copies), some thick socks, other things we didn't want, and a Ganesh tee-shirt, so there is a god: Ganesh!

God provides

We had been planning to make our own way to the Terracotta Army but, discussing our plan, we soon admitted to each other that we were tired of everything being difficult and never doing things the slightly dearer, easy way. To begin with I had really enjoyed the challenges, but six months of Asia had worn me down a bit and Japan completely finished me off. So we booked a tour through the hostel. China outside Beijing and Shanghai is not as easy, so we couldn't be bothered with trying to do it ourselves.

Ooh looks quite nice. Maybe we picked well this time...

When we went out for dinner ordering was quite difficult too. Most of the time Chinese food just isn't very nice. It's always the meat that ruins the dish though. The problem seems to be that they don't have butchers in China; either that or they are all axe-wielding maniacs. They don't seem to have the concept of cuts of meat, in fact I don't know what they do with all the bits we would call meat, because the food always seems to be made from assorted grisly bits. The dish we ordered looked quite nice to begin with but, after a couple of fork-fulls, serving yourself was like dredging the canal for body parts. Probably the nicest animal product was horrible wobbly stuff, possibly gelatine flavoured with stock, but at least it wasn't all bone and skin like the rest of the meat. Soon, eating became, in practice, dredging bones from the dish and transferring them directly to the disposal dish.

Horrible wobbly bits were the best part

Mostly untouched "meat". The clean bone didn't start with flesh.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 4, 2009 from Xi'an, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
Send a Compliment

comment on this...