Day 3. Desert

Mingsha Mountain

After a nice breakfast, we went to visit Mingsha Mountain 鸣沙山, a huge desert park. The taxi ride was a short 10-minute drive to the central gate 中门 of the park. We bought the tickets at the gate and got in.

There were lots of vendors selling all kinds of things. Besides the usual souvenirs and food, there were lots of vendors selling photography services, helicopter rides, camel rides, ATV rides, sand slides, shoe covers. It was a hot day and Claire did not want to do any of these. 

I bought round-trip shuttle tickets to the Crescent Lake 月牙泉. The lake was very unique because it was in the middle of a desert. We bought some ice cream at the building next to the lake.

Got sick 

We went back to the hotel and I realized that Claire had a fever. The hotel staff told me that there was a pharmacy nearby, so I went to buy a thermometer and some ibuprofen. At the recommendation of the staff at the pharmacy, I also bought some pills of Chinese medicine, which turned out to have no efficacy in our hands. 

What surprised me was that the Chinese ibuprofen had no efficacy in reducing fevers for us. I don't know whether it is because of different dose, different formulation (capsule in China vs. tablet in the US), or something else. 

I then used the app MeiTuan to buy Tylenol (made by Johnson & Johnson, not Chinese generic acetaminophen) to be delivered to the hotel. The medicine was delivered within 20 minutes. That helped to reduce the fever. 

While Claire was resting, I decided to do laundry. We packed super light for this trip with one carry-on luggage per person, and saved plenty of room for Claire to buy some souvenirs. The hotel had free washers with detergent. There was a patio area with ropes to dry clothes. It was desert weather and our clothes dried in half a day.

Since Google was blocked in China, I tried to search Chinese websites for information on ibuprofen dose and usage in China. It was full of misinformation and I gave up. I called Ethan so that he checked the ibuprofen doses at home for both over-the-counter ones and the prescription ones. That gave me some confidence to double the ibuprofen dose on the label.

Claire was quite sick throughout the afternoon and night. She had stomach issues fever. She took Loperamide (which I packed for the trip), and had to take Tylenol and ibuprofen multiple times throughout the night. 

Things I liked and did not like

The delivery service was really impressive in China. 

Lessons learned was that I should pack medicines like ibuprofen and acetaminophen in our next trip.

No access to Google turned out to be a bigger issue than I thought. The misinformation on medicine was quite dangerous. Another issue was that Google authentication/verification was disabled. For example, even though my bank website was not blocked in China, I could not log in to my bank account because I used Google login. 

Like the SIM card issue yesterday, WeChat Pay was another example of complicated usage rules that they don't tell you. I could not use it at the pharmacy despite that I had money. Luckily I had some cash and paid with that. It turned out that WeChat Pay had maximum amounts per day and per transaction. Exceeding the max amounts at one level would result in a 3% service fee. Exceeding the max amounts at another level would stop the transaction. It took me some time to figure out that the second max amount could be removed. Same experience as the mobile network yesterday, customer service was very bad, just reciting scripts to brush me off.