Our only two reasons for being in Taiyuan were to visit Pingyao, a town almost entirely still as it was a century ago, and the Shanxi Museum, listed as one of the best for English tourists in China. Therefore our first job was to secure our onward journey. One of the biggest headaches in China is that you can only buy train tickets from the station you are at so by the time you arrive and try and buy your onward ticket the trains have already been sold out. This was, predictably, the case in Taiyuan. After an amusing chat with an extremely camp soldier in his best school book English (he is now the only person other than a doctor to ask me how often I exercise!) then a fruitless trip to the ticket counter we headed to the bus station and immediately and easily bought a ticket for the nest day. Bus travel was proving a far easier prospect than the trains!

For the afternoon we headed on to the museum. It proved to be a brilliant succession of displays on all aspects of Chinese history all housed within an amazing inverse pyramid. Though it was centred on Shanxi province (apparently they invented pretty much everything!) it was a brilliant introduction to a lot of history that we simply didn't know about from a time when the area was at the end of the silk road and a real hub for merchants from both Europe and Asia. I would recommend it for anyone in the area, though would suggest staying in Pingyao and doing a trip from there for the day, the rest of the city is pretty uninteresting and doesn't have any hostels.

For the evening we headed to a restaurant that specialised in local noodles. We realised upon entry that we were the only westerners in there and by the reaction of the staff and customers the first for a while! We thought we'd quickly order a couple of beers then tackle the menu. Soon after we were presented with a large basket of dumplings and a teapot. Hmmm, good start. We used the lonely planet to point to the dishes described in there that we wanted to try and I started on the dumplings. I grabbed the first one and took a bite, the whole restaurant collapsed in fits of laughter. The waitress hurriedly ran up and repeated a word very similar to 'Tsing Tao', the beer we thought we'd ordered and pointed to the teapot. After 5 minutes of repeated gesticulations and my protests that there weren't any cups to put the tea in she gave up and took the teapot, poured the contents in my saucer and dipped one of the dumplings in. It turned out the teapot was filled with vinegar to accompany the dumplings. Hiding our embarrassment and eternally thankful there hadn't been any stray teacups on the table when the pot had been delivered we settled in to a really rather nice meal. Although it was awkward being stared at the entire time we got used to it by the end and headed back to the hotel for a quick incredibly expensive beer (it was about the same as it would've been in England!) then bed.