Friday, July 18 We woke up early and headed straight back to the CITS office. Thankfully, Josh felt a little more within himself in the morning and did not explode on the CITS guy. When he saw us, he knew something was wrong and recognized his mistake when he looked at the tickets. He ran us over to a bus ticket station and bought us tickets to a city called Taiyuan from which we could catch another bus to Pingyao. We got the bus fine and slept some and saw some funny Chinese movies on it. In Taiyuan, we had to take a taxi from one bus station to another, buy new bus tickets and get on the right bus to Pingyao. This we managed reasonably well with only a little help and pointing and gesturing, but no English. The second bus to Pingyao was more adventurous with not great roads the whole way and random passengers picked up and dropped off all along the highway. No one seemed to think it was weird, so we tried not to either. We finally arrived at Pingyao at about 3:30pm after 5 hour and 2 hour bus rides.
Our Pingyao hotel, the Yide hotel, is super cute and the town is a very well preserved ancient walled city that is very old and pretty small. We had dinner immediately upon arrival and took an exploratory walk around the city. We are glad to have made it to Pingyao, it was worth the effort. The train tickets we had to Xi’an were for tonight (we were supposed to pick them up at a hearby hostel) and were no longer available, nor were our bodies available for more travel today. We are staying the night in our hotel and will leave in the morning on another bus to Xi’an and should arrive early afternoon and be close to back on our expected itinerary.
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That’s a lot of bus-riding for one day.
At least there weren’t chicken running up
and down the aisles.
ps. Pingyao.
As for your last three days’ entries, WOW! But no one should think you would get China toured without a hitch…just look at the Italy luggage fiasco!
Glad you are having a great time and all is well. Love, Mom