change of plans
Okay, I’m close to having all the tickets and whatnot I need for the rest of my time in China, which will be a relief. Have I mentioned that you can only buy train tickets here in the city they start from, and that nevertheless you have to buy tickets on popular routes like 5 days in advance? This is true except when it isn’t, which is sometimes, and no one quite knows why. In any case, I have a train ticket to Jiayuguan, the city where the solar eclipse on Aug 1 is, but no ticket onwards from there, and it’s probably impossible to get one. So instead I’m going to take a bus and a plane and go to the famous Buddhist cave art at Dunhuang instead of the less-beaten path through Xinjiang province. Not too shabby a backup plan. This afternoon, I’m going to take a bus to the Tibetan monastery town of Xiahe and stay there for a couple of nights—so maybe no posting for a few days. In other news, Feili and Rachel took me out last night for hotpot, which contained a ridiculous range of things that were delicious and could have given me food poisoning, and one of them gave me food poisoning. But I think I’m on the mend already. It was just kind of a mosquitoey, food-poisony, alley-neighbors-up-till-dawn-playing-mahjong kind of night.
