Day 236: Within the walls

This morning we were up at 6.30am and downstairs having breakfast not long after. After checking out, we walked to Holiland for some more pastries and then caught the very crowded metro to Beijing West railway station. Unfortunately, when we got off the metro, there weren't any obvious signs to the train station itself and no-one on the help desks was much help, but after a bit of random wandering we eventually found the north entrance. I went into the ticket office and showed our tickets to a uniformed woman with a clipboard and she said something about the south entrance, so we walked all the way back down into the metro station and came back up, where we found then the way in (I later discovered that we could have just gone in through the north entrance and walked across). Once inside we found ourselves in a very big train station indeed, and we quickly found our very big waiting room.

After a while, our train came up on the board and we made our way through the gate and onto the platform, where our first bullet train awaited in all its streamlined glory. After consulting our tickets, we set off for carriage 11, only to discover that the carriage numbers stopped at 8. Thankfully, there was another uniformed woman with a clipboard standing nearby. When I handed her our tickets she consulted her manifests and scribbled some new numbers on our tickets. Apparently, both our carriage number and our seat numbers were wrong, but soon enough we were ensconced in some comfy seats waiting for our journey to get under way. There was still time for a bit more confusion and chaos as it appeared that one of us was in someone else's seat, but some of the Chinese passengers helped to clear things up and soon all was well in the world and the train started moving. At the end of the carriage was a big LED display that showed the train and station details. It also showed the train speed, and not that long after we had left Beijing, it informed us that we were hurtling along at a tidy 300km/h. 

The journey we were undertaking takes something like eight hours on a conventional train, but after only about four hours we arrived in the city of Pingyao. Our ultimate destination was the city's ancient quarter, so you would think the fact that we had arrived in Pingyao Ancient City station, rather than the city's main station would be good news. Not so much. This was a new station built some way outside of town to cater for the bullet trains. So our next job was to choose a taxi driver from among the horde that instantly descended upon us as we exited the station. As usual, we chose the one who made the least attempt to foist himself upon us. We haggled a little over the price and then climbed into his battered little vehicle. There had been a lot of rain last night and this morning, so we splashed in a lot of pot hole puddles as we drove, slightly fearful about how the poor old car would cope with the battering it was taking. The road eventually brought us alongside the old city's very large walls and we soon pulled up near one of the city gates. This was as far as the taxi could take us and we started to get our bags out, but the driver indicated that we should wait as he made a call on his mobile. Not long after, a guy from our hotel appeared and helpfully guided us to our accommodation, which was in one of the city's traditional courtyard hotels. Our room was very small, bout our bed was very big – occupying almost half of the room. This was a traditional kang bed, common in northern China and used both for sleeping at night and general activities during the day. Built using bricks, its interior cavity would be connected to the stove in the kitchen, allowing it to be heated from underneath.

After dumping our bags, we went for a walk into town. Once a major financial centre with a history that dates back about 2,700 years, Pingyao is a roughly rectangular walled city, with major gates in each of the four walls, as well as a few other subsidiary gates. The main shopping strip runs roughly north to south, along the road that runs from the north gate, then along a little dog-leg on the east-west road, and then down to the south gate. The town has been wonderfully well preserved and is a World Heritage site, but sadly, the main drag is just one long tourist trap, populated by shops selling a limited variety of souvenirs and restaurants serving a limited selection of local delicacies. Much of the centre of town is nominally pedestrianised, but the locals ignore the regulations banning motorised vehicles and bring their scooters in. The road is also choked with Chinese tourists in groups big and small. Being a family of white folks, we're a real novelty, and as we walked around, we were stopped regularly by people desperate to have their photo taken with the beautiful white girls with the lovely blue eyes. 

TripAdvisor had given a high rating and very good reviews to a place called the Shrew Cafe, and when we found it, we were charmed by its slightly bohemian look, which set it apart from most of the other establishments we'd seen so far. We were less charmed by the price of a coffee, so we decided to order a beer instead. The beer was pretty expensive, too, but it was also unrefrigerated – when we ordered it, someone grabbed a bottle off the shelf and brought it over to our table. When we suggested that we would perhaps prefer a cold one, we were offered ice. It was at this point that we stood up and bade farewell to the Shrew Cafe and all who worked there, and wandered off to find somewhere else to have a beer – which wasn't too difficult.