Part 6

Still unable to connect directly to the blog, my daughter takes care of posting my emails. Unable to upload pictures, I may be able to do so int he future.Today day 4. Xian, Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. If was a driving day, about 14 hours including the stops. So no much to report ecept for the gas stations. In itself it is a story. They are huge, they accomodate score of 20-wheelers. There is a restaurant, and of course toilets. We use the restaurants to have a hot soup. Basicaley it consists in dried noodles and dried kind of meet. You add hot water and you have a soup. They are very good and sometimes very hot since there is no way to understand what is written on the label. No one speak English, let alone French. So no communication except smiles. The truck drivers are very nice, they look at our cars which look like toys as compared to their truck and have alway a grin on their face. We explain that we are going to Tibet and their grin become larger. When they see our car engine, their grin becomes a laugh. The toilet must be described. They can host 100's people, they come in all kind of shapes, sometimes very creative, with efficiency in mind. No paper, no door but usualy very clean. if I had time I would create a catalog of them. Time is what we lack the most, we arrive late at hotel where a banquet is awaiting us with the city official, we go to bed late and wake up very early (6am this morning, 5am tomorrw). So it is hard to squease an email.

Part 5

Day two: After a short night in an historical hotel inside the walled city of Pingyao on a wooden bed, feeling like being in the “Red Lantern”, we thought we were going to visit the city. Not so, first we had to go through the welcome of the Mayor and the TV routine. Finally we went in the narrow streets and the houses that had been undisturbed for centuries, some dating back to the Ming Dynasty. Extraordinary travel in time.
Then we hit the highway to reach Xian along a long road with heavy traffic. Highway driving is quite simple in China, you do anything at anytime to gain some distance. We learnt fast. Example: we cut off a police car while passing a group of trucks from the right emergency stop lane. In Texas we would have gone to jail for the rest of our life. Here, not so, you pass or you get passed, no aggressiveness, no insult, you just keep moving. By the way the roads are filled with trucks carrying anything you may think of, in quantity. There are no 18-wheelers, rather 20 or 22-wheelers. The industry activity is palpable, besides the trucks, you may see road workers everywhere and cranes filling the horizon. If there is a crisis, we cannot see any clue of it from our vantage. Tomorrow no driving, we are going to visit Xian and among other the Terracotta Warriors. I have no time to upload pictures, we are getting to the hotel too late and leaving too early in the morning Love Dad