Devon Winrick

December 15th Yutian, More Missing P-Traps, and Meeting More Awesome Family

The next day we drove to Yutian to meet with more family. We'd be staying at a much nicer hotel, but that didn't prevent me from finding some amusement in the shower.

We drove from city to city. You can see the outskirts of the city here.

To get there was a bit of a challenge, as it had been snowing, and a lot of roads were closed. We tried to take some back roads, but our SUV was a couple millimeters too big for the entrance to a bridge.

Here's downtown Yutian.

Not after long, we arrive at our destination.

Note the blue sign on the wall in this video - it says if you have a "man issue" then you can go to a certain hospital ("9 dragon").

We visited various family members on our mother's side of the family. A lot of them live in very old, small houses, but they seemed pretty happy.

I took a few shots of inside and around the houses.

My wife slept on this bed as a kid - she said it gets very hot.

See the tanks on the roof? The sun heats the water in those, and that's how you get a warm shower.

We went from that to having a dinner line this. You can imagine why this is a big deal to them.

This dinner was hosted in our hotel, which had a display of huge gold fish in the lobby.

As the night nears an end, you might be tempted to take a shower, but do you dare?

Our last day in Yutian it snowed quite heavily. The workers of the hotel tried keeping ahead of the snow, shoveling it with large brooms. Eventually they gave up, as the snow quickly filled any path they cleared (one of them could be heard saying something like "fuck this").

The snow also brought out an interesting design flaw of the parking lot. The parking lot looks very fancy, with red stripes going through it (the Chinese love the color red).

However, the red stripes are made of a very smooth material, and as soon as the snow fell it became incredibly slippy, and you couldn't see it as it was under the snow, so everyone had an adventure getting to their cars.