Day 238: Step back in time

In the morning, Kate went out the North Gate to find something for breakfast, eventually returning with some juice and a fascinating assortment of little individually wrapped cakes and biscuits. These little treat usually come in larger packs, but many of the local supermarkets also sell them individually – by weight rather than by piece. Kate bought a wide selection so that we could see what we liked and what we didn't, as we're probably going to have to eat them again for other breakfasts.

When we were done, we all went back out of the North Gate to get our museum tickets. Pingyao is awash with small museums – courtyards like the one that houses our hotel that have been preserved much as they were a century or so ago, complete with furniture and various artefacts relevant to the type of establishment that the courtyard used to host. One ticket gives you access to all of them, and by visiting them one by one, you can get a pretty good picture of what life was like in the town at the turn of the 20^th century. Before we got started, Kate and Zoe bought hats – the weather is now very warm and sunny and we're doing a fair bit of walking around. 

We started with a temple, then went to a couple of banks, a 'folk house' and a martial arts school. For lunch, we stopped at a place called the Petit Resto. As I mentioned earlier, Pingyao is full of restaurants serving local specialities, but the local specialities don't really look all that appealing – and neither do the restaurants - and after getting a taste for it in Beijing, we were craving some 'normal' Chinese food. Thankfully, we found what we were looking for at the Petit Resto, and we had a lovely lunch of fried rice and stir-fried pork and veges. 

After a little rest back in the room, we headed back out to grab some dinner, going back out through the West Gate. On our previous excursion beyond the walls we had spotted a guy selling roast ducks, and it was him that we visited first. We chose a cheap, rather scrawny individual, with lovely dark-coloured skin shiny with oil. With a practised hand and a great big cleaver, the guy chopped the duck up into little bite-sized pieced and scraped the lot into a bag for us. We then went to try to find an ATM that would actually hand over some money to us – easier said than done in China. ATMs aren't that hard to find, but many don't like the taste of our British Visa cards and will either spit them out straight away or just refuse to grant our requests for cash. We didn't have any luck, so we headed back to the food stalls and grabbed some fried rice and noodles from 'our' guy, and I bought a couple of lamb skewers. (Earlier, as we were on our way back from the bank, I had noticed a stall right at the end that was grilling lamb over charcoal. The guys manning the stall were clearly Muslims, and hanging from the roof of the stall was a whole side of lamb, which one of them was slowly dismantling and turning into more skewers, alternating pieces of meat with small chunks of fat. It was clear that these guys were the real deal, so I had to try out their product. And yes, the skewers were amazing – the meat juicy, tender and smoky, the fat crunchy on the outside and liquid on the inside and just, just on the right side of gamey.)

We then walked back to our hotel, stopping first at a thankfully more compliant ATM and then to pick up some fried bread. We ate the lot in our courtyard, washed down with my first bottle of Chinese red wine, which I had picked up from the supermarket yesterday. No, it wasn't all that nice.