Cycling The Silk Road In China – On the streets of Zhangye

Outside the Dafosi temple, we saw some women sitting on low stools, surrounded with plastic buckets.
They were making a leaf wrapped sticky rice with local dates.

We wanted to taste what they were making.

One of the ladies took a small flat bread, filled it with the cooked mixture of sticky rice and dates, sprinkled it with sugar and gave it to us.
Another elderly man, pulled two low stools for us to sit on, gave us chopsticks and napkins and showed us how to roll the bread and how to eat it.

It was SUPERBLY YUMMY.

Later on a market street, we saw a man selling the funky sunglasses that I saw elderly men wearing along the Silk Road.

It turned out, that these sunglasses are made from two slices of dark stone.
They looked too funky to pass, so I bought a pair.

I walked around the market wearing them, making everybody laugh at the weird foreigner and her wacky sense of style.
I could almost hear them think: “Doesn’t she know that these stone sunglasses are worn only by elderly men? Dior or Dolce and Gabbana are cool glasses not the stone Old men’s round stone glasses.”

But to me, the glasses while heavy and not very practical, are super cool.

We ate a dinner in a restaurant serving “Small Hot Pot.”
They have refrigerators filled with skewered vegetables, seaweed, mushrooms, tofu, etc.
They give you a stainless tray, and you select what you like.
You give it back to the kitchen, and they lightly cooked it in boiling water, and smeared it with spicy sauce. It was very tasty.

After dinner we spent some time at a lovely tea house, drinking flower, Goji berries and lemon tea.