some Lanzhou memories

sorry, no pictures.

When we walked to the grocery store from our hotel, there was a very busy street to cross. Luckily there was an underpass - down some stairs, under the road, back up the other side. On one of the notice boards under there, someone had spray painted "New York City Graffiti" - it made me laugh every time I saw it!


After we went to the Lanzhou museum, Megan took us to Pizza Mira and ordered us some pizza. We ended up getting the Traditional, which had ham, pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, olives, tomatoes, and artichokes. The crust was kind of like a cross between cornbread and biscuits, but it was good. YuanYuan loved the sausage and the mushrooms, so I picked my pieces apart to find them for him.

The waiters would come around and fill up your water glass - tiny little juice glasses full of hot water! I was thirsty, though, so I must have had half a dozen little glasses of hot water!

A family came in and sat in the booth next to us. A mom, a dad, an older daughter, and a younger daughter. Megan had told us at the zoo that in some places, if your first child is a daughter, you can have another child in 5-8 years, depending on where you live and what ethnicity you are. So, the daughters were about the same age spread as Em and Evie - the younger was probably in kindergarten, and the older one was probably 10 or 11. They argued and played together, and reminded me so much of my girls that I got kind of teary at the restaurant!

The younger one took one look at us, smiled very big, and kept repeating "THANK YOU VERY MUCH! HAVE A NICE DAY!" I am guessing that she learned it in school? She thought it was funny when I said Ni Hao back to her.



We also met a man on our flight from Lanzhou to Guangzhou - it was after the layover in Xi'an. He asked where we were from, and I said America. He smiled really big and said "USA! New York City?" I told him that we were from near Chicago, and he got excited and said "Chicago Bulls! Basketball!" He wondered if we were going to live in China, or just visiting. We told him visiting. He asked how old Andy was, and laughed when I told him "ar". which is two in Mandarin. (he will be 2 the beginning of April)



At the zoo we met a woman who was of one of the Muslim minorities. Megan said that the woman was from in the mountains, a very rural area. She was very curious as to why we were with a Chinese baby, and kept asking me about him. Finally our guide came over to translate and said that the woman was shocked that people adopted babies from China - that in her ethnic group there is no one child policy, and that babies are never abandoned, and special needs babies are not abandoned, either. I don't think that she was in favor of Americans adopting from China, judging from the tone of the conversation.