Greetings from Lanzhou
I just got an interesting e-mail from my dad, who’s arrived in Lanzhou safe and sound. I thought his message was pretty amusing, and I can definitely tell that he’s getting a sense of that difficult to describe dose of oddness that many westerns get when they first go to China.
He writes,
“This has so far been one of the weirdest of my life experiences. We were met by a huge delegation at the airport, complete with news cameras, a red carpet and bouquets of flowers. We were then driven in a caravan of black Audis 50 miles through the desert hills. The highway is new and has virtually no traffic. The desert hills, mile upon mile, have been terraced by hand and planted with trees (in the desert!) Huge sprinklers, vastly wasting a scarce resource, struggle to keep the trees alive. At the hotel, another legion of people met us. My hotel room has the word “Welcome” spelled out in flower petals on the bed. This place is stranger than strange. I feel like a Martian here.”
Glad your dad sensed the “weirdness” of Lanzhou. It is a really weird place, even to some
Chinese like me. I suspect your dad’s hotel in Lanzhou is the big one with huge gardens called the Lanzhou Hotel where Deng Xiaoping used to stay in. It’s run by the Gansu provincial government. The place is usually teeming with hookers. And many staffers, including security guards, work as pimps.
When I stayed there for a few nights on a reporting trip a few years ago, I had to move to another room in the middle of the night because hookers kept on calling me and knocking on my door insisting on offering me “healthy massages”, I told them I’m a woman and was not interested. They wouldn’t go away. Every night was like that. I had little sleep. It was quite an experience.
See this article:
http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/magazine/2000/0728/biz.china.html
I bet the government cleaned up the prostitution before your dad arrived and the trade is back on again now. As for the huge sprinklers along the way from the airport. It’s all part of the show. They were wasting the precious water that Lanzhou residents sorely need.
Lanzhou may be wierd but the folks here are known for being friendly… I’ve lived here now for three years and other than the people being a bit farmerish and backwards at time, they’re great on the whole….