Travel the Silk Road - Zhangye Train to Lanzhou

We took a train from ZhangYe to Lanzhou. We bought some pears for the kids' coughs, so a fruit knife would come in handy on board. I packed the small knife inside a cabin bag together with the fruits and put it through the scanner, expecting at worst it might be detected and confiscated, as with Kristine's pair of art&craft scissors at Beijing airport. As I bent down to collect our bags after the Xray scanner, a male police shouted at me wanting to see my ID. The police just wanted to check my ID randomly. The two lady guards attending to the scanner screens let our baggage through. They scanned the baggage but not the passengers, just like Beijing subways. Unlike Lanzhou train station where passengers had to go past a metal detector, Zhangye didnt have that. Not that it mattered anyway. The passengers before and after me while passing through Lanzhou train station all triggered metal detector alarms. Yet we all went through unchecked.

The journey took 7 hours. We had two middle berths. Chatted with a young lady at the bottom berth. She was an English teacher from Xian, visiting her husband , an airforce officer in Zhangye. He is entitled to 68 days of annual leave a year (48days for singles), to be taken all at once, so they don’t get to meet often. Yes she had tears flowing down her cheeks when we first met her on board.

I asked her how her students like learning English. She said they disliked the subject, finding it difficult to remember the vocabulary. Her job focus was to prepare her students to pass English exams. Her job was considered satisfactory by her boss as long as her students scored above 100 out of 150 full marks. Interestingly, a letter posted at the Yamaha Music School where Kristine practises piano urges local parents NOT to pressure kids to take music exams. How true! Appropriate but not practical in China.

Kristine had some time catching up with her Chinese homework on the train. Kimberley focused on jumping from one berth to another. The train arrived in Lanzhou at 00:10. Kristine and Kimberley fell asleep at 1030pm.... Had to wake them up when they were sleepiest.

That concludes our tour of the Silk Road, a small section of it. With that end, Kristine and Kimberley left their bedtime coughs in Lanzhou. If it was not due to the super dry air, it must be the cig smokes.