Next step on the road

A lesson of work

When I ask what Yang Dong said when dad asked him if he could come with us, dad looks at me with astonished eyes and says to me: “It’s extraordinary, the young student said; “you know, I don’t speak English, I have no experience so I don’t know if I can fulfill Mister Reza’s expectations.” I tell myself that this is a good work related lesson. Dad adds: “I told him for this trip, English is minimal and I knew about the lack of experience since the beginning, but your motivation is good so I propose to you that you come.” Finally Yang Dong accepted. After lunch we took the car to go play basketball with some of Mr. Li’s students and another friend of mine. We arrive in the room and decide to do teams of three, me with both of my friends against three of professor Li’s students. Without counting points in the beginning, it was obvious we were beating them since I even managed to score twice 3 points. But after an hour and a half of playing, we started keeping score and then we were losing by 8 points when we had to stop to let other people play. Mr. Li is there and explains to me that there was a problem with the tickets. Actually, I understood later that Liu Jia had taken standing only tickets and that he had managed to find us seats on the same train through contacts of his. I go visit his laboratory. He studies with his students the different types of pollen. I drink a tea and we head to the hotel where dad is. Dad, Mr. Li and I look at possible and interesting routes. In the end we opt for being picked up by car at the Lanzhou station by a friend of professor Li. He will then take us to Xining where we’ll stay for a day or two and then go around a lake next to Xining that has a high concentration of a Tibetan minority outside of Tibet. Then, we’ll head towards the city of Zhangye where we’ll take a train that will bring us to Urumchi.