Pingyao - The ancient city

We left our retelling onboard the speed worm to the ancient city of Pingyao. Pingyao is a settlement famous for its ancient walls, ancient temples and ancient buildings. In short for being ancient. We arrived in the afternoon at the Pingyao ancient city station, don't confuse it with the pingyao railway station as we did. This time our GPS acually worked and we found our mistake quickly and realized that we couldn't just walk to the ancient city center. We quickly changed plans and went to the bus waiting in front of the station. Google translate said that its final destination was Pingyao ancient city, which in our opinion seemed good enough, so we boarded. The bus was the right one, though the stop we thought was ours was not the final stop of the bus, but the one we were at, Pingyao ancient city railway station. For 2 yuan we were prepared to take the chance that it just drove in the right direction and it did! We got off the bus infront of the southern gate of the ancient city walls. The long history of Pingyao started over 2800 years ago, but the well preserved city wall was build in the Ming dynasty around 1370. The old town inside the city walls consists out of small houses all in traditional chinese style. Our first quest was to find our Inn. With the directions on our portable magic boxes we only walked into one wrong inn before we found the right one. In our defence: they don't always have the same name written on the front as they have on Trip.com and the houses don't have numbers. Our inn had a lovely courtyard and our room was the opposite from the one we had in our previous nights establishment. We had two large beds, not the most comfortable ones (the matrasses were only 3 cm thick), our own bathroom and the floor was not filthy. The inn was run by the most adorable, elderly couple. After dumping our bags in our room we headed out to explore the city. The ancient streets were lined with red lanterns and shops one could explore. They either do not get a lot of western tourists or we are just a wonder to behold, for a lot of people we passed stared at us and tried to inconspicuously shoot fotos of us. Our next quest lead us outside of the city walls. We needed to get more gold. The gold mining mashine inside the ancient city walls was very fancy behind a hidden door, but did not accept our foreign card. Outside the ancient walls we aquired new gold and dinner. We ate two different noodles (one were thick circles (2 cm diameter) arranged like a flower), both very tasty but we needed to assure the cook that we could handle chilly. Once we returned to our inn the lady running it wanted to show us the light show in front of the ancient southern gate. When we got there a large crowd already gathered. While waiting we draw the attention of several groups. They were very eager to communicate with us but failed at finding a common language. One settled at staring and talking to our innkeeper. She did not have the abiliy to communicate with us without external help either, so she couldn't have contributed a whole lot to the conversation. I am still very confused what the group was talking about, for they talked about us for at least 20 min. I would call us decently interesting people, but our appearance alone couln't have provided too much topics of conversation. Maybe they were all very boring people and had nothing better to talk about. The light show itself was very impressive. Someone projected images straight on the ancient wall and watchtower atop it. After the show our innkeeper was determined to show us around the lantern lit city for a bit. She did not offer us a lot of new information as we could communicate well, she walked very slowly and we were interrupted frequently by people wanting to take pictures with us. In the end we happily sank into bed. It was important to do so slowly, for it was more of a box with pillows than a soft bed.

6.6

Morning came and we had a very important appointment: breakfast. Our fabulous inn provided complementary breakfast. We sat outside in the sun enjoying a meal of steamed buns, cucumber-tofu-salad, eggs and potentially rice porridge. It was all very tasty. Strengthened by that we explored more of the labyrinthe of ancient alleys. We looked at the different small shops and ancient temples. After lunch we made a siesta in the courtyard of our inn, before continuing our wandering. The ancient city center of Pingyao is not very large and by the afternoon we had walked all around the ancient city wall. For dinner we ate at a small store inside the ancient city.

7.6

That morning we rose a bit earlier. We broke our fast on with rice porridge, steamed buns, eggs and two different kind of noodles with veggies. That day our innkeepers even gave us chopsticks. They did not think us capable of managing them but they also realized that the tiny fork-spoons (Göffels) they gave us were far off from ideal for eating the long noodles. After breakfast we grabbed Meeko and Pascal, snapped a picture with our innkeepers, said goodbye to the ancient city of Pingyao and took the bus to the Pingyao ancient city station 8 km away from the ancient part of the city of Pingyao. We had not secured tickets for our journey on, for we were paranoid to miss the train once more. Therefore, we headed straight to the ticket office. To our surprise the lady behind the glass window had the ability to comunicate with us. Her vocabulary was not very extensive, just enough to tell us that there were no tickets on trains heading to Beijing left. We tried to tell her that we did not mind changing trains and showed her options that we could take, at least according to Trip.com. That was where she reached the end of her vocabulary. After a bit of back and forth and pointless conversation circles she gave us tickets for a connection over Shijiazhuang. No clue where that is or how to pronunce that. If these trains will acually carry us to our destination is to be seen. So far we have boarded the first train, have taken a picture with the guy sitting next to us and have earned a few curious stares. The next part of our adventure in the not so ancient city of Beijing is told elsewhere, for at the point of me writing this we have not yet been there. I am very curious about all our future adventurers.