Hey all. So we've left Beijing (finally!) and have arrived in Pingyao. It's a beautiful old town with tons of history, definitely worth a visit. Back in Beijing we did the sights. The Forbidden City and Tian'anmen Sq was awesome as were the parks around it. But it was busy! Absolutely packed with large tour groups. They're really funny to watch actually; there are loads of them all wearing the same coloured baseball cap and play follow the leader. Most of them are old and get delighted when they see us Westerners. It's great fun watching them try to be sly and take pictures of us... the Chinese aren't very good at that. What's worse is that we ask them to take pictures of the four of us afterwards and they manage to cock it up every time! 'Wow, great picture of the sky there!' So yeah, Tian'anmen was cool and we also visited the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace was awesome. We hired bikes to get there and back which was great fun. About an hour and a half each way. The palace itself was built around a lake, which was expanded by Emperor's over the years. It also had a marble boat... smart that one. We were lucky as well with the weather. Original forecasts stated we'd be in for rain for the majority of the week but they quickly changed and we only had the rain the one day Briony got here. After that it's been perfect blue skies, shorts, t-shirts, sunglasses, suntan.
We set aside Sunday to go to the Wall. Unfortunately our plans went to shite and we couldn't get to the site we were going to go to. The only buses running went to Badalling, which according to our Bible (the Lonely Planet), everyone and his Dog goes there. So we gave that a miss and went to actually organise going to the Wall the next day. We went for another wander around Beijing as well. We bought our new mascot 'Slab'. It's a 1 and a half kilo block of flapjack! It was so big we gave it an identity (although it's just about finished now).
I was glad we did re-organise our Great Wall expedition. The place we went to was brilliant! Absolutely amazing. It's called Huahuang and took about 2 hours to reach, leaving at 6am (which meant getting up at 4.30am). When we got there we were practically the only people there. It was a huge park area with a lake, with part of the ruined wall stretching across in certain areas. We weren't technically allowed on the wall bit itself but we climbed up nonetheless. It was a great day, and I managed to cap it off superbly with 'Poo-Shoe'. Poo-Shoe was the name Briony came up with when I went to go to the outside bog and fell through the floor next to it opening up the cess-pit below! It stank. Horribly. I walked back up to where the stream went over some rocks really fast and tried my best (in vain) to clean my leg and left shoe.
This day turned into being the longest day ever. Back at the hotel I managed to grab a shower. They told us we couldn't as we'd already checked out. But it's communal and they didn't notice me slink away from reception. Anyway, it was a really long day because of the train ride to Pingyao. It's a 12 hour overnight train which left at 7pm. Unfortunately all the sleeper cabins were taken so we were in cramped seats full of some very inquisitive Chinese people who liked to play music out of their phones all night long. So yeah, didn't get an amazing nights sleep and couldn't have been happier to get off the train.
Pingyao is great. We were taken from the train station to the hotel in the old part of town by a buggy thing with some seats. It sounded like it'd collapse under our weight but we got there okay. Unfortunately Alice has come down with another stomach bug. I feel really bad 'cause I've had none and she's had two, and Pingyao really is a lovely place to explore. Thankfully she's feeling a bit better tonight and will hopefully come out to dinner with us. This afternoon me, Andy and Briony rented some bikes and went outside the old town to a temple near the city. The bike ride was cool though we did manage to get lost. We then followed this bloke on his moped through some really dodgy areas. At this moment we were thinking we had made another Song mistake (Song was the guy who took us to that place in Qingdao and offered us coke). But we got to the place fine. Unfortunately they wouldn't let us in unless we bought a really expensive ticket allowing us to get into everything in Pingyao. We don't have that kind of money so we gave it a miss. On the way back a pedal fell off my bike... but I managed to disguise it well enought to get my deposit back!
So that's it for now. We leave Pingyao tomorrow afternoon and will arrive in Xi'An around 7pm. Looking forward to seeing the Terracotta Warriors and going to some of the surrounding mountains. Bye now!
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