Street food: fried noodles

I used to have the idea that street food was dirty and cheap and something to avoid at all costs. But in fact I'm started eating it regularly, now that I feel my stomach has mostly adjusted to Chinese microbes, and I'm becoming convinced that it's one of many alternative, tasty ways to eat in this country. Even rather upstanding Lanzhou denizens, and especially college students, enjoy it. Just outside the university gate nearest to where I live lies a street lined with carts and cooks at most hours of the day. In the morning it's filled with 'breakfast' carts - e.g., people selling steamed or fried buns, egg and scallion crepes or thicker 'pancakes', rice porridge and soy milk. Over the course of the day, the composition of the carts changes, and slowly (at least I think it's slowly, but I am still getting a handle on the operating hours of the various carts) these become replaced with carts serving up fried rice or fried noodles, dumplings, cold thick rice noodles, lamb kebabs (a bit of meat grilled on a stick), or offering grilled corn or sweet potatoes. There's also a common type of stand with many types of vegetables and meats on sticks, which you select and then get fried , spiced, and chopped up for you to fill that bread which resembles pita but is much denser than pita. These kinds of stands aren't everywhere, and there are certain intersections where they congregate and create a rather lively atmosphere and quite a lot of choice for dinner:

I guess I try to be careful to only eat at stands which look clean and where other people are eating, and eat food which has just been cooked. In any case, tonight I ate fried noodles on the street near the gym I've joined (more on that in some future post). It's pretty cold these days, and so I hesitated, listening to the nearby KFC also calling, but the prospect of those steaming hot, just cooked fried noodles drew me nearer. I ordered my small bowl and sat down, while waiting, to be served, a small bowl of 'soup' which I'm pretty sure is the water previous customers' noodles were boiled in (strangely ok...). Feeling a bit warmer, I decided to photograph the production process:

Cutting strips of dough, this lady hand-pulls my noodles

and chats with me at the same time (see video below).

The noodles are in to boil.

Fellow customers

Various spices in the bowls on the left, the raw ingredients
(e.g., cabbage, beans, peppers, onions, tomatoes) in the baskets.

The chef fries the raw ingredients up with the noodles and flavors them with who knows what, though I know the ingredients include tomato paste, oil, soy sauce, and likely MSG (see video 2)

The table is set with everything I might need: the white kettle contains vinegar, the metal kettle contains 'soup' to drink, the white jar with lid has a hot pepper sauce, the blue container has single-use chopsticks, and the green bin has a roll of toilet paper serving as napkins.

My noodles arrive in a bowl covered with a clean plastic bag so that after I finish the bowl can be reused right away without washing, and if I want to take my noodles away I can easily transport them in the bag. The small bowl is my 'soup' to drink.

Sorry the videos are sideways, but I can't figure out how to rotate them. And please don't laugh at the first, the lady just happened to choose the moment I was filming to ask where I was from and to compliment my Chinese...