(oh the QTP won’t let me be, let me be me….)

Now you have the ear worm too!

Featuring Yak.

The kind that you see (and forget to take photos of),

And the kind that you eat:

Once upon a time, I went to China.

The trip was wrapped up in a lot of stress and guilt-feelings for various work and work-adjacent reasons, but I won’t go into that here because who wants to remember that in ten years time.

But, as part of the trip, and part of the stress, I was teaching a short course in city called Lanzhou.

Which, for those of you playing at home, is where you get if you start in Shanghai and head for Kazakhstan, but stop when you’re about 1/3 of the way there.

I took the high-speed train from Beijing, against initial suggestions from my company to just fly there. The flight takes about 1.5 hours but the train is only 7, and is the clearly-superior option so long as you can find your way through the giant train station.

A few notes on my train experience:

1. Everyone waited to board show boarding passes a bit like on a plane– I was initially freaked out that the line wasn’t moving but everyone was just waiting until they opened the gates about 20 min before the train left.
2. You can order food on the train but you need some kind of app ?
3. You need to bring a tumbler for tea! Or, if you’re hungry, feel free to bring instant noodles. The first class had hot water service coming around constantly, and other trains I took had hot water taps/fountains. All the Chinese Uncles I was sitting across from had special tumblers where the tea leaves are in semi-separate compartment on top of the thermos so you can invert to infuse, and I felt very uncool drinking my sad little coffee.
4. The train is CLEAN, like ‘they mopped the floor about 5 times while I was on board’ clean!
5. There are free little snack bags with mini mixed treats on first class. It’s not a meal but it sure is cute.
6. The wifi sucks.

Some snacks. Some they gave me, some I packed.

The bottom right is a haw flavored jelly. These jellies were by by far my favorite sweet I found in China. I really liked that the consistency was particularly liquid. It reminded me of a bit of when my granddad once put kiwi fruit in the jelly and the kiwi enzymes made the jelly not-quite-set, and all of us grandchildren like the jelly so much that we forever-after demanded that he make more ‘Not Quite Set Jelly’.

It also made me think of being some sort of insect that pierces another insect (probably a caterpillar) with a straw-like mouthpiece and then sucks the insides out.

Weirdly, when I described this joyful feeling to Sameer, he did not appreciate it.

Anyway, I arrived in Lanzhou, was picked up by a taxi driver who was both very easy to find and very kind. He brought me to what is definitely one of the fanciest hotels I’ve ever stayed in, and I made my way up into a room that is probably larger than my London flat.

In the fanciest of hotels, even evil robots looked kinder !

I sat down and did a few hours of concentrated work, and then, when I got hungry, decided to wander out into the street.

Lanzhou is an intersting place, and had a definitely different vibe from Beijing, somehow verging more towards what I’d seen in India, complete with a lot of motorbikes and various other kinds of transportation.

The people were lovely, and I successfully pointed and smiled and Alipayed my way into some new and exciting fruits, bought from lovely Aunties with fruit stalls.

One of the things was this little fellow, on the left, who I bought because it was clustered in with the ‘fruits’, but became more and more convinced might actually just be a fancy-looking eggplant.

When I asked my Chinese colleague his response was basically ‘shrug’, and when I asked if he thought it was poisonous he reccommended trying it to find out (which is probably the most scientific way to go).

Turns out it is a pepino, aka Solanum muricatum, and is therefore the cousin of an eggplant, but fairly firmly on the fruity side of the fruit-vegetable continuum (although I did also note that where I visited in China tomatoes also seemed to cluster with fruit, and were often served alongside grapes and melons?). Anyway, this guy was recognized by my Latin/south American friends, and tastes like a melon-y cucumber.

The thing next to it is a bayberry, which I’d also never seen before. The texture is kind of ‘thicker skinned berry’, and the flavour was very close to a mulberry. Quite delicious, but with a largish stone inside, and problematic only because the highly invaginated structure means that the rot (in fact ferment) almost immediately after you buy them. Especially if you buy them when it’s 30+ degrees and 58304% humidity out.

The third picture is a frozen piece of durian, which I ate sitting on the side of the road (which, based on the stares I got, might not be a thing that people do in Lanzhou?), because I did not want to try to take it back into my hotel.

I’m not the biggest fan of durian- I won’t scoff a whole fruit- but I do enjoy it as a ‘ sometimes food’. Plus not it reminds me of my favorite of Szymons, which is a nice bonus.

There were also some really interesting streets that were clearly dedidcated to one single thing alone

Although I ended up with lots of fruit (stonefruit, not pictured, were also in season and friggin’ delightful), my actual quest was for La Mian, a special type of very thin noodles that are the specialty of the region.

I didn’t manage to find them that first day, but did end up with some VERY delicious spicy and sour sichuan-style noodle, which I was not angry at.

By this point in my journey, my pointing at foods was very often accompanied with questions about my ability to eat the spicy food. In this case, the noodles made me sweat, but were thoroughly delicious.

I walked around a bit more, and then went back to the hotel to do some more work.

On day two, after a lot more work, I headed out into the wild again.

I bought myself coffee (insert cheers for China Abilities!), and then walked towards the river.

I spent way too much time trying to work out how to get into a very nice looking garden, which I think (following an interaction with a guard), might have been some sort of government place or palace, and was not open to tourists.

I then spend another way-too-much amount of time trying to work out how to buy fabric in a fabric market, and feeling very defeated when I failed.

It’s a bit unclear to me if all the fabric was only for making clothes within the shop (you buy the finished product, not the fabric), or the Aunties just couldn’t understand my apple-translated-‘communication’.

Fabric in my heart but not in my hand, I continued on my river-quest… and spent another way-too-much amount of time trying to work out how to cross the road and actually get into the river park.

Once in, the park was quite beautiful, with old waterwheels set against the modern city skyline:

I stopped for some cold noodles (which were ok, given that the stop was less ‘cafe’ and more ‘pavillion for Mahjong Aunties to hang out’)…

… and then walked a bit more through the park.

^I’m fairly certain this guy is making the noodles I had still failed to procure!

A bit hot and sweaty, but certainly beautiful!

That evening, I made it back to the hotel (for more work) and managed to meet up with my colleague J, who was absolutely awesome in every way, and really made the whole Lanzhou experience awesome and less-stressful-than-otherwise.

We were supposed to set out for a ‘lab visit’ (visiting scientists in their work place to hear about their science) the next day with people from one of the universities, but had been surprised to learn that this usually 9-to-5 kind of excursion would in fact be a 6am to nearly 9pm day out!!

Dear reader, it was worth it!

It turns out that we were heading about two hours north to a place called Haibei, a prefecture to the north east of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau.

We were going to the friggin’ QTP!!

The QTP is a massive (the world’s largest!) plateau, which is also the highest in the world. It’s sometimes called the ‘third pole’ of the world, and the frozen mountain caps act as a water source for people across central Asia.

It’s also pretty prominently featured in research I read about, so it was very very cool to get to see the region in real life.

Because of the altitude, the UV is very strong- in a way that you can very much feel.

Luckily, my kind hosts let me borrow this very cool hat:

And yes, I did also put on some sunscreen.

Our 6am start allowed us a quick train station noodle breakfast before a 1.5 hour train, then a brief discussion with the local authorities about me being there (I had to be pre-approved because the area is not generally open to foreigners), and then we headed up to the Institute. First for some talks, and then for some tours of the experimental sites.

I took a lot of photos, but won’t publish them here because they are largely of the experimental sites, which may be unsuitable for public eyes.

So instead, let’s look at some food, including this amazing beef stew with rolled dough on top:

A local speciality!

One of the greatest things about China was trying so many different foodstuffs- mostly plants of various kinds- that we just don’t eat at all in Australia/Europe.

We spent the morning looking at the field sites and hearing about all the cool science, then had lunch, then headed back out to some more distant sites.

I really liked seeing these ‘puddles’, which are caused by rapid freeze-thawing and collapse of the soil structures in local areas. It was also very awesome (in a purely nerdy way) to see the little mini-ecosystems these dips made, and- at a broader scale- to watch the landscapte types change from drier grasslands to wetter marshy sorts.

Along the way we heard a lot about the environment, and also learned about the local people and cultures of the area.

Plus, there were mushrooms!

^^ Commence Sound of Music Soundtrack!

We ended the day with an early dinner of local noodles and dumplings…

And then headed back on home, and (pretty much) straigh to bed.

The next two days were incredibly busy, and I’m very very grateful to my two colleagues- one who was presenting with me and hung out throughout the QTP visit and beyond, and another who helped organise the whole thing.

I miss the ‘performance’ and ‘teaching’ sides of science a bit in the current job, and the two days of courses we gave were a fun reminder of how much I like doing those things. Despite the surrounding stresses, it was ultimately a positive experience.

I’ll end with some of the amazing food we ate over the days, including the hand-made-right-in-front-of-your-eyes la miennoodles from the hotel, and the very tasty skewers the three of us went out for one evening:

Plus some amazing lunch and dinner offers from our lovely hosts:

The week of the 23rd of June, 2024