Monday 28^th January, 2019 1600

In the end I decided to chance a quick breakfast yesterday before we left for the airport. It was fine for Alice, not so for me. Sofitel blotted their copybook when they offered me a teaspoon to eat cereals with, then a Chinese porcelain soup spoon/ladle thing. Where are the proper spoons that were there yesterday? We don't have any. My breakfast was a solitary slice of toast and marmalade. Considering we were only the second set of people in the minute they opened I would have expected everything to be in place.

Now the taxi that took us to the airport took the direct route, no detours to rack up the charge and even his meter showed 76¥ so I am still no wiser as to what the real cost should be. Maybe the Swedes were telling porkies for all I know.

It took an hour and ten minutes to fly to Lanzhou but two and a half hours to get from Lanzhou airport to home! By the time the airport bus dropped us I told Alice I'd buy her lunch, she fancied a hotpot. I wasn't hungry, having had a croissant and some fruit on the plane but would happily have sat and had a beer while she ate. By then, in the freezing cold once again, my bladder was screaming for relief so I said wherever we went had to have a toilet. Oddly, some restaurants in China will fill you with liquid yet don't have anywhere to pump ship. The restaurant we tried didn't have a toilet and now I was getting desperate. Eventually we found somewhere on the 3^rd floor of a building, outside a defunct restaurant but had to take the lift to the 4^th floor and walk down! I came perilously close to having an “accident”.

Then Alice decided she just wanted to go home, so we did. She went back out to get some noodle, vegetable and meat concoction to take away, had that and promptly slept until dinner time. I thanked my foresight for having frozen lasagna to save cooking.

Although the plan was to have a lie-in, her Mum called her and demanded that she get to her home by noon today. That meant leaving at nine so for me at least it was another early start. She had packed Sunday night and wasn't taking a shower before setting out. I hadn't and I was.

The 131 took forever, the three minute walk to the long distance bus station was more like fifteen and all the while Alice was convinced foreigners with no Chinese ID cannot travel on coaches. Passport is fine for hotels, planes and trains but not coaches? When she got our tickets I made much of the “miracle” that I was in fact allowed to travel.

Online it had said the bus to Baiyin took 1h 20m but it was nigh on two hours, so we got to town twenty minutes after Mum's deadline. I wanted a taxi to the hotel as I didn't want to walk much further in even colder weather than we had just left, however a bus came before any taxis, three stops and we were off, about a hundred yards from my hotel. She had to come in with me even though her home was right where the bus stopped, because I had read that nobody spoke English in the hotel. They don't. No bar either but a shop next door sells beer. The room is ok although even on high the heating is not keeping it cosy. I will eat dinner here in a while, wondering whether to splash out on lobster at 568¥ a kilo or whether to have spagbol or steak, the only western options. Or maybe, Chinese.

I'm on my own for the night despite Alice being just across the road, Mum's birthday meal is always apparently hotpot. That I can eat. It also seems I may be able to get bacon and eggs with toast for breakfast so I shall give that a try in the morning.