Here's a picture of my sister Jane eating fried eggs in soy sauce with chopsticks at the airport - they didn't give her a knife and fork.The plane from Shanghai to
Lanzhou was 3 hours. Lanzhou is in Gansu Province and has about 3,000,000 people. It's on the Yellow River and is wedged between two mountain ranges so the city has a strange shape and the airport is 75km out of town, the first place flat enough to land an airplane. The trip into town showed the arid nature of Gansu Province, one of China's poorest. 
I don't see how anyone could make a decent living from the land here, its so dry and difficult. 
Lanzhou itself is very industrial and has the reputation of being the most polluted city in the world. Its certainly fairly dismal although we found enough to do.
Still trying to work this out but below is a photo of a sculpture of the characters from the TV show 'Journey to the West' otherwise known as 'Monkey'!!!!! Who watched this as a kid? Yes, Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and Tripitaka, and Horse of course. I think the journey they were on must have been via the Silk Road. They were on their way to India.We managed to book overnight train tickets today as well, for tomorrow night to Jiayuguan. We bought hard sleeper tickets for 113RMB each, the trip is about 15 hours long. People told us the hard sleepers are fine.
Here are some pictures from a night market that we went to, mmm yummy. Chicken feet, lambs head and pigs trotter. Not much took my fancy.
We also found a pottery bar, it sells tea and beer, and you can get on the pottery wheel for 20RMB / hour. It seemed to be mostly a local hangout.
At the hotel room that evening, we kept getting telephone calls from women who would either speak Chinese to us for a bit or just hang up. Jane had heard that prostitutes randomly ring hotel rooms in search of a nice man for the evening. We took the phone off the hook.
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