Day 239: Happy feet

In the morning, we went out of the North Gate looking for a woman cooking some sort of egg-based dish on a food cart who Kate had seen yesterday in the hope that she could whip up an omelette for us, but of course she wasn't there today so went back to the supermarket for more of our funny little packets.

It was looking like another scorcher today – it eventually made it into the low 30s – so we stopped to by Sarah a hat and then walked back through the town visiting more museums. Today we opted for the offices of an armed escort company, a furniture museum and the government offices. The last of these was located towards the edge of the city and spread out over very extensive grounds. It included a pretty grim looking jail and several rooms devoted to some rather horrific instruments of torture – divided up into their various uses, from extracting information to killing prisoners. They were accompanied by some pretty graphic illustrations and photos of people on whom the instruments had been used, so we hurried the girls through as quickly as possible.

After lunch at the Petit Resto, I went back to the room while the girls all went out for a massage. Massages appear to be a bit of a thing in Pingyao – there are numerous places offering them (along with those weird foot spas, where you dunk your feet in a tank full of fish that swarm around and eat the dead skin from them). The prices are very reasonable, and Kate had been angling for a foot massage almost since we arrived. She and Zoe got an hour-long foot massage for 30 yuan (£3), and Sarah got a half-hour back massage for the same price. 

In the evening, we went out of the North Gate to see if we could get something for dinner, but there wasn't anyone there. Thankfully, just inside the gate was a woman roasting chicken legs over charcoal, so we bought a few and fleshed out the meal with some fried bread and a big piece of a sort of savoury pancake thing. On the way back, the girls spotted a live goldfish on the road (I'm not sure how it got there) and Sarah rushed it back to our room and put it in a mug with some water, where it seemed to perk up. Once again, we ate dinner in the courtyard with some cold beers from reception.