My official transfer date was August 1st and I immediately got staffed for a job where I had to be on site in China on August 2nd. It was already August 2nd in China when I got staffed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the nature of the job so I really shouldn't be surprised to find grass in a park.
I flew out of ORD and did a (kind of stressful) layover in Shanghai for my final destination of Yinchuan.
The first week went by quickly and the customer gave us a day off since we were going to come in during the weekend anyway.
We figured it would be a good time to do some touristy things! An operator told us about a tomb we could tour so that was first on our list: the Western Xia Tombs. We started off by checking out the museum of artifacts before we headed out to look at the actual site. There wasn't any access to to the inside, but they were pretty impressive with the Helan Mountains as the backdrop.
Second on the list was the Helan Mountains Cave Paintings (this is rated a quadruple A attraction, AAAA). This started off with another museum tour on petroglyphs around the world. We ended up doing two rounds in the museum trying to find the exit to get to the shuttle up the mountain. We ultimately settled on exiting through the front and walking around the outside of the building to get to the back. When we saw a stream of people exiting from the back of the building, we had to go back in an find out how we missed the exit. We felt like huge dummies, how did we manage to miss an exit that literally a whole tour bus full of Chinese people filtered through? Turns out, since neither my chief or I can read Chinese, we both missed the taped up handwritten sign that pointed towards a dark stairway that eventually led to the exit.
I didn't expect to see any wildlife in the area due the the high amount of tourists, but a family of deer came down to drink out of the stream while we were there. The AAAA rated tourist attraction also had one of Han Meilin's Art Museums at the end of the shuttle bus ride. He's the guy who designed AirChina's logo and designed the China 2008 Olympic mascots. I don't have any pictures of the artwork inside the museum since the staff was gracious enough to give us a tour through the museum in english!
I found out later that theres a cool looking bridge somewhere in the Helan Mountains that's also attached to a hiking trail. So the next time we get a day off we'll probably go take a look at that. One of the operators also mentioned a hot spring nearby. But do I really want to sit in a hot spring in the middle of summer? Do you find grass in a park? (Yes.)