Just don’t steal anything
Evidence that Lily really did receive her cups from the hotel staff in Samarkand.
I wish I had a picture of Lu’s face and a recording of the gasp she let out when Lily announced that she had acquired two cups from the hotel in Samarkand in Uzbekistan.
The gasp was followed by a deathly silence before Lily chirped with a big smile, ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t steal them. They gave them to me last night as a present for my birthday.’ That’s when Lu finally exhaled.
It also prompted her to remind us not to steal anything from hotels, especially in China.
According to Lu, hotel staff across China do a complete inventory of every room before they let her check out and pay. Any losses are charged to the group account.
Lu recalled a woman, on an earlier trip, who was ‘collecting’ hotel towels for a friend. She managed to make off with one early on, and then kept swapping it for a slightly better towel as the group moved across China. Just before leaving the last place, the staff noticed the towel left behind was a ringer, an imposter, a foreigner. So on the bill it went. Took Lu a while to track down what had happened.
We’ve all been very well behaved on this trip. No thefts, at least not any that have been detected. One cup went missing in Kashgar, but that was from Will’s room. Will is our driver and owns the company. Lu didn’t make an issue of it and just paid for it. She figured he set it down somewhere outside the room, and forgot to retrieve it.
Where to next? 
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