Sept. 4, 2011 Xining, China Tech Issues and Cold Weather Clothes

Today was all about shopping for cold weather clothes and trying to understand and resolve tech issues. When we tried initially to go to our blog site we kept having Internet connection issues so we then went to our gmail account and believe we have posted to the blog yesterday's account of our travels and medicine search.

The other tech issue we have is that since arriving in Xining the BLackBerry has not been receiving or  sending emails, but still functions as a phone. We checked on the iPad and there are new emails. We did a call to T-Mobile customer service and they did some reset but was still not working when we went off to do our clothes shopping.  We had called the travel agency representative here and asked her to send a taxi to take us shopping and bring us back. This worked out quite well as we both got good warm jackets with fleece linings that are removable and gortex exteriors, we bought gloves and one more pair of binoculars. The weather continues to be cool (wearing our fleeces) and rainy. On our way walking to the same excellent restaurant as last night we bought some winter pants and another lighter weight gortex jacket.  The items we bought on the way to lunch are most likely North Face knocks offs.  We had another excellent meal with the help of our same waitress from last night.  Can't tell you what it was but we definitely handled our chop sticks better today.  On our way back to the hotel we cruised through a local very large grocery store selling all kinds of foods, housewares, and paper products.  Very interesting to see as 30 years ago we would not have had to carry in all the diapers we did for Aniesa if they had been stocked the way they are now.  We have only seen one other Western face so far in Xining, and there are no McDonalds, Pizza Huts, etc.  

Once T-mobile was up again on the east coast we tried another time to get the BB reset. We were told we would need to wipe it of all information and then maybe it would receive data. We decided to wait till we got to Lhasa before taking that dramatic step. In the morning we were not feeling very well but towards the end of the day we were feeling less light headed and stronger. Dinner was just soup and toast at the hostel working on the tech issues. We were able to do a Skype call with Peter.