Wednesday, July 16 Today started a bit crazy. We were tired after spending a late night trying to distill our belongings down to a volume that would fill one less bag … in the end, it didn’t work. We realized laying in bed that the station listed on our train tickets didn’t match any of the names of stations on our maps and that we needed help deciphering the nickname. At breakfast we asked our host, who was very helpful, but nervous about the city traffic and our ability to get to the station on time. She hustled us out the door and hailed us a cab. She was great and we HIGHLY recommend our B&B, The Mao’er Hutong B&B, to anyone in staying in Beijing.
We made it to the station with plenty of time to spare. We figured out our train car and sleeping berth with ease and made friends with three recent university grads soon after boarding. They were happy to practice their English and were headed to their hometown of Datong. Josh took a few naps on the 7 hour ride and Jeannette even caught one herself. We saw some amazing views along the way including beautiful mountains, rivers, countryside and more.
When we finally arrived in Datong, our new train friends all took photos with us before parting ways. As we exited the station, the local CITS agent (Official China Gov’t Tourist Person) grabbed us. It was just what we wanted for Datong. We reserved train tickets, both for tomorrow night’s overnight train ride to Pingyao and for train tickets for the next night’s overnight ride from Pingyao to Xi’an. The second tickets we will pick up in Pingyao from the local CITS person there (who actually runs a hostel), but it is nice to have it out of the way. In addition, we decided to buy the CITS transportation package to see the Yungang Caves (easy enough to get to by local bus) and the Hanging Temple (not easy to get to without arrangements). This was nice because Jeannette really wanted to do both and we couldn’t figure it out otherwise.
After taking care of business, we took a cab to our hotel, in the center of Datong. It is very different from Beijing. That said, Datong-ers speak very highly of their city and are very proud of the city’s history, full of periods of great glory and now they are proud of their bountiful coal supplies and boast of providing Beijing and all of their province with power. After we checked into our hotel, a very nice one, we walked around to get a quick sense of our bearings and then headed to one of our best dinner’s yet at Deyue Lou. As it is so close to Mongolia, Datong is the place to get some mutton hotpot, and that is just what we had at this Muslim-run restaurant. They didn’t speak a word of English or understand a word of our attempts at Mandarin (not even Tsingtao) or our attempts at charades. We just started nodding yes in response to every question. After the craziness of our ordering (the waitstaff was incredibly attentive and helpful), the food was amazing.
On our walk back to the hotel we stopped at the city’s Drum tower to have a look and called it an early-ish night. We did notice that Datong is a bit off the tourist path, most notably we get the same stares as anywhere else, but here people are surprised enough that they aren’t prepared in any way to hawk their wares, we do get the occasional “hellooo!” especially from young children emboldened (and directed to do so) by their parents.
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They didn’t understand Tsingtao?
What is this world coming to? 🙂