From Kaifeng we took an overnight train to Beijing but not before having another go around the night market…seriously crazy and delicious food!
We spent 6 days in the capital city and still didn’t get to see everything we wanted to. This is probably a good time to mention that while traveling and seeing the sights of China is a priority of ours, we have also been eating our way through…probably not much to your surprise! One cannot explain how good even the most ordinary of food here is! A plate of noodles is hardly inspiring in the West but here, we wake up thinking ‘Noodles, noodles, must have noodles!’ So, when we arrived at our really cool (literally and figuratively hostel in a hutong (narrow alleyways typical of old Beijing with one-story courtyard homes that are rapidly being destroyed by the vast amounts of massive building construction) www.redlanternhouse.com, we asked them for a good place for baozi (steamed buns stuffed with different types of fillings). Their recommendation turned out to be a big winner and we proceeded to eat there most of the mornings. We were pretty tired the first day since we had spent the night trying to sleep on the sleeper train so we thought we might take it easy. We went to see the Olympic park…Bird’s Nest and Water Cube which are very impressive indeed. Then we went to another night market for dinner and found it just didn’t compare to the one in Kaifeng so dinner was a bit of dud. Just as well we had amazing baozi to look forward to the next day! 
Next day we woke to rain! and visited the INSIDE of the Forbidden Palace which took up most of the day. We had Peiking duck for dinner…I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how delicious it was, but it was pretty delicious! Then we met up with a friend of some of our family who is from China but lives in the US and happened to be visiting her family at the same time we were there! We went to a really cool area of bars set around a lake (HouHai) and sat and visited in the empty jazz bar seeing as it was Monday night.
The next day, Yulan took us shopping at Ya Show and the Silk Market. I broke down and bought a pair of fake UGG boots (they are super cozy and warm!) and watcher her work her bargaining magic. It was entertaining to watch her yelling her price as we walked on to the next shop and looked at other things and then, continuing to yell as we walked around the corner and out of sight. We were yelled at and even grabbed a couple of times by the shop attendants desperate for us to buy things. LJ was asked ‘Hey mister, you want to buy my pants?’ which we have been laughing about ever since. That night we went to a small little restaurant around the corner from our hostel and ordered 2 bowls of noodles and, yep, they were incredible and cost the equivalent of 1pound 50 p/$2 and they even filled LJ up!
Wednesday we rented bicycles and spent the majority of the day cycling around HouHai lake and some really cool Hutongs. That night I convinced LJ that an acrobatic show was worth our time and a larger percentage of our daily budget. Yulan motivated me with the bargaining and I asked the hostel for a special discount and got one…apparently they had never offered it to anyone before…Yulan rubbed some of her bargaining magic off on us! We saw loads of crazy stuff like contortionists, crazy juggling of 10 balls and then some hats and then umbrellas and the 12 girls balancing on 1 bike for the finale. Great stuff. Then we went to see the very impressing new CCTV building…this is not a building that makes CCTVs for England but rather is the China Central TV bldg and is pretty dang impressive. We’ll try to post pics.
Thursday was the day at the Great Wall. We opted for a less popular/less visited portion so we had to leave quite early. Breakfast was included in the tour price and it consisted of a McDonald’s breakfast bun with some kind of unidentifiable meat (too bad for the vegetarians) and coffee…very Chinese. After about 4 hours of traveling in buses we got there and, as always, were encouraged to take the cable car and as always, we didn’t. We were told the walk up would take around 30 to 40 minutes and wouldn’t you know, it only took us 15. Even though it was a less-visited portion of the wall, that didn’t discourage touters and we had a few ‘Missy, you want beer coffee?’ I’ll have to try that one day. I did bargain for the must-have cheesy tourist souvenir “I climbed the Great Wall” t-shirt for LJ and got them down to 1 pound 50 p.
Next day was a visit to the Summer Palace which was chocked full of red-hat-wearing Chinese tourists. That night we decided to have a go at the Chinese cinema…we managed to find one Chinese film that had English subtitles that wasn’t a love story. It was entertaining but not in the normal sense such as great cinematography or a good story line but rather for its very cheesy storyline and its really obvious and basic CGI. I would tell you which one it is but it doesn’t even have an English name even though they bothered with English subtitles. Good fun though and the popcorn was caramel corn! Yum!
Saturday was our last day in the capital and we were leaving that afternoon so we chose to go and look for another one of Beijing’s new modern buildings with a crazy architectural design called the Linked Hybrid, designed by Steven Holl…we’ll try to post pics but the place consists of 8 massive buildings connected by sky bridges. We had a bit of an adventure trying to get to the bus station from our hostel in order to leave for our next destination. The hostel recommended a route to get there but it was obviously one they had never taken as it was not that easy which means I had to resort to my basic Mandarin and Beijing’s luiliqian (or whatever it was) regional bus station is not an easy name to remember so LJ kept having to follow me with the book with the characters so we could point to it. We started our attempts with the underground hoping to carry on with public transport but bailed and looked for a taxi. We waited for at least 15 minutes to find one that wasn’t full and when we finally found one, he just waved his hand to me and refused to take us…that was such a fabulous feeling. I slammed the door really hard to indicate to him how cool I thought his decision was. We finally made it and got a really nice bus (which should have been, seeing as it was more expensive than our sleeper trains and it wasn’t even an overnighter!) with LOADS of leg room to Datong. We made the classic mistake when we got to Datong and got a taxi without asking how much it would cost and didn’t say anything when we noticed the meter was not running. When we got there and he told us that the 5 minutes and 4 kilometers was going to cost 50 RMB/5 Pounds. I shook my head, told LJ to stay in the cab with the stuff and ran to the first person I saw and asked (or at least tried to) how much 4 km should cost and did they agree that 50 RMB was too much. I got agreement so I threw 15 RMB at him and we took our stuff and walked off to find our hotel. It was late and really freaking cold so we really didn’t feel like walking too far. As has happened quite a few times, we found that the hotel we were looking for was not there. Well, it was there but was not the same name and looked MUCH nicer than our budget would allow but we decided to give it a go. Thank goodness we did because it was cheaper than our HOSTEL in Beijing and was a proper nice hotel with a bathroom in each room and western toilets and free toothbrushes and everything!!! After the palava of getting to Datong, we were super happy to be living it up in the great hotel!
Sunday morning, when we woke up and looked out our window, we discovered a dusting of snow on many of the rooftops and cars! We were expecting it to be cold since we are traveling off-peak but snow in October was a little surprising! We wrapped up warmly and went to the Yungang Caves which were very impressive! They are 5th century caves containing 51,000 ancient Buddha statues which are some of the oldest collection of ancient Buddhist carvings in China. Very impressive and perhaps one of the most amazing sights we have visited thus far.
Yesterday was finally a gloriously beautiful sunny day without a cloud in the sky…a vast change from the snow from the day before but still SUPER cold! We had another episode of Chinese traveling. We wanted to go to what sounded like a very impressive hanging monastery outside of the city. We got a bus at 1:00 and found out that the last returning bus to the city was at 4:30. We started to go but only found out that we were being shipped off to another bus at another bus station which took ages to leave and took ages to get out of the city. It took us about 3 hours to get there when it should have only been 1 and a half hours and when we got there it was much smaller than we had imagined…very impressive and impressively small. We were so tight for time that we couldn’t even go into it so we had to stand on the bridge in the freezing wind, take pictures for about 5 minutes and rush back to the taxi that we had been dropped of to because the bus couldn’t be bothered to drive us all the way there.
Last night we took another sleeper train (goodbye lovely hotel) to Pingyao and when we arrived this morning we were picked up by the hostel that we had booked…what a luxury to not have to bother with taxi touters or walking for miles with our rucksacks! Our hostel is a really cool traditional courtyard Qing or Ming dynasty building. Our room is a traditional Chinese room with a little table sitting on the long bed with 2 teacups ripe for drinking green tea! We thought we might have a chilled out day to recover from the little sleep we got on the train journey but were convinced otherwise. We took a tour that we will describe later as it is 11 p.m. and we still haven’t gotten any sleep so it is time for bed! Weather in Pingyao today…SNOW AGAIN! Unbelievable but very picturesque.
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