It’s a travel day. Since sitting on a train doesn’t lend itself to much picture taking, I decided to upload a gratuitous picture of Cindy slurping noodles. Today begins the itinerant portion of our China travels. The Silk Road was littered with outposts and towns that have since grown into larger cities. Their modern infrastructure and construction covers up some hidden historical treasures. We want to discover what they’re hiding so we are stopping at several Silk Road cities en route to our final destination in China. We also thought this would be a good way to divide up what would otherwise be an insanely long train trip.

Our first stop is Tianshui. Translated, that means Sky Water. It might be the coolest city name I’ve never heard. For unknown reasons, the high-speed rail skips a portion of the track from Xi’an to Lanzhou (a large city in this area, though not one we will be visiting). There is high-speed rail from Beijing to Xi’an, and from Lanzhou to the end of China, but not from Xi’an to Lanzhou. We were forced to take the slower Soviet-style trains that have seats with the consistency of unbelievably hard marble.

On a side note, Cindy wants everyone to know that her legs have become very strong from squat toilets, and her butt very soft from the Soviet-style train seats.

We arrived in Sky Water in the afternoon and cabbed it over to our hotel. China is beginning to develop independent hostels, but they’re most prevalent in larger cities more frequented by tourists. Smaller places (Chinese small, as Tianshui is still 400,000 people) are sticking with hotels and motels. Right next to our hotel is a market street, where we grabbed a cheap takeout meal before heading back to our hotel to work and catch up on the blog.

For the record, Sky Water is not very high, and has only a small river.