MAY 1st HOLIDAY, Part ONE of MANY: To Lanzhou!

Weaseling out of class two days before our break officially started, I met up with Dan late one Wednesday afternoon and boarded a Gansu-bound train.

In the morning I shared breakfast on the train with Gwen, the organizer for the Yale Book Club trip (hence the extra mantou (wheat bun) and bowl of zhou (rice and bean gruel) on the tray).


Dan employed his arsenal of sense-numbing instruments in order to sleep well into the early afternoon (and possibly to sleep off the effects of the baijiu (or 'white spirit') he had consumed the night before with two of our amiable and ambitious bunkmates, Gansu natives who told him of their plans to start a China-wide used car auction website).

I begrudged him neither the baijiu nor the sleep, seeing as the views were awfully nice:

Arriving in Lanzhou, the provincial capital, in the mid-afternoon, this advertisement was one of the first things we saw. I'm not sure why I found it so very amusing, but I suspect that the promise of "procreation health" and the image of doctors in wing formation are equally responsible.

Lanzhou was nice enough, though we didn't see much of it. The day was clear and temperate and you could see the mountains that surround the city at just about every broad intersection.

I was pleased to see that the same socialist realism construction signs sprinkled across the capital are used outside of it, and that as in Beijing, the real workers bear little resemblance to their heroic representations (although at least in Lanzhou they were wearing hard hats).

I was undecided, however, on whether the indications on Lanzhou's public recycle/waste bins were more or less clear than Beijing's. It appears that the former would be quite useful in the event that one had an organism to dispose of, but as one rarely does, it is not surprisingly that the Lanzhou bins were no more successful in achieving the separation they desired.

Visiting Lanzhou was also my first real opportunity to see the famed Yellow River, a river which has great historical and cultural significance (its name derives from the fertile yellow loess soils on its banks out of which Chinese agriculture first developed), but more importantly was the backdrop for one of my favorite childhood stories; the tale of a little duck name Ping who was cruelly trapped by fisherman and separated from his family.

A slow start, yes, but only the beginning of what turned out to be a truly awesome journey. Stay tuned for the next installment.