Two New Videos! Mountains and Laundry!

Got two new videos for you today! The first is from my visit with Benjamin Xi to Lanzhou's Bai Ta Shan, or White Tower Mountain.



That was a very good day and it was nice just to get off campus with a couple of buddies and do something fun. By that time in my trip (May), I was really itching to get out of the classroom and out of the campus and try new things. This was one of many trips to that area and I always thoroughly enjoyed myself around the Yellow River.

The area around the Yellow River in Lanzhou is very nice. There are a lot of very small places to eat along the sidewalk and lots of places to buy drinks and just chill. The weather in Lanzhou is simply perfect during pretty much the entire summer, so there are always a lot of people just kind of lounging about and hanging with their friends, skipping rocks on the river or playing with their dogs or flying kites - it really is a great time. Being a foreigner, every time I went down there by myself, I always got involved in a long conversation (in Chinese, of course) with the locals. They'd always be fairly lengthy, maybe an hour or so, but by the time I left, my brain was exhausted, yet very gratified by my progress.

This next video is somewhat less exciting, but it was a big part of my life in China.


Yep, I made a video about washing clothes and buying stuff at the market. The whole time I was in China, I washed my clothes by hand. Hot or cold water, adding my detergent, washing, rinsing, all of it in a little tub/basin, I washed my clothes every week. Laundry day really was laundry DAY.  After I got coat-hangers and was able to wash and hang up more clothes, laundry day became a dreaded day. At the beginning it was new and refreshing to have to work for my clean clothes, but after two or three months, the refreshment gave way to that everyday drag. Life goes on.


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New Video: 5 Springs Mountain and Zoo!

As promised, new video post=new blog post. Here is a video from me visiting Lanzhou's 5 Springs Mountain, also known as 五泉山.



The mountain is located in the South Central part of Lanzhou and it has a fantastic view of the city and its surrounding mountains. One thing I didn't expect to see on a trip to a mountain was a zoo! For a city like Lanzhou (equate Lanzhou to Midland/Odessa, Texas....it is a relatively remote desert industrial town), the Lanzhou had a lot of animals in their zoo! Birds and all kinds of animals from all over the world, not just Asia! Zebras, lions, red pandas, vultures, leopards, all kinds of stuff!

However....

Zoos in China are a little depressing compared to America - animals, for the most part just sleep because the majority of them are in concrete enclosures with no companions and no grass and no...toys or anything for them to kill time. So basically they just sleep and sleep and are very bored. It's actually kind of sad. Zoos in America are very natural and the animals are pretty content, I think mostly because our animal protection laws are so strict. In China, it's not so strict. Except for pandas, who get the royal treatment, the animals just seem sad. I just didn't want to take video of it. I do have this one picture of their Sika deer:

After you get through the zoo, you're pretty much 1/3 of the way up the mountain, so you can just follow a cut out pathway and climb the stairs all the way to the top. It'll take maybe an hour and it's fairly steep, so you'll be tired, but the view is definitely worth it!

Yeah, Chinese cities are much different than American cities. They're much more dense and just in general seem to be devoid of a lot of color. When I was out driving today around Tyler, I was just overwhelmed by how open everything is - you can see a lot of the sky, there are trees everywhere, it's just so different....not skyscrapers as far as you can see.

In Tyler, Texas, there are no overly clogged roads due to unexpandable roads and overly compact cities. There's no constant cloud of pollution creating that blue-ish grey haze that you see every single day.

Just different.

Now remember - I said at least 3 posts a week until I had everything put up from the trip! So keep coming back!