We're both feeling a bit broken today - the train journey itself wasn't too bad - we actually had a better sleep then the previous night in Datong - it was the bus to Pingyao that did it though - 1 and a half hours of pain! China's eqivalent of Cannon and Ball were on the bus tv at an insane volume, back to back standup sketches involving lots of shouting and arguing - mixed with the horn happy bus driver blasting his air horn before every slight movement or when another driver within 100 metres changed lane - was a perfect sound track to the extreme poverty that we were witnessing as we drove through the Shanxi province - defintely a country on the way somehwere - countless building sites with the bleak communist past in the background gradually being pulled down.

When we arrived in Pingyao, apart from the fact that none of us wanted to get off the bus as it wasn't exactly the picturesque town that we were hoping for - it turned out that the poverty had hit Pingyao hard in the 20th century- we still had to take a tuk tuk to our hostel with 4 scandanavians who we teamed up with earlier in the day. One of them had been in Beijing for 6 months so we were able to put our lives in her hands as far as finding a taxi to the bus station and negotiating a fare for the tuk tuk.

When we finally arrived in Pingyao after 12 hours plus of travelling (if you count the two hour wait in the train station waiting room with 100 chinese people staring at you - the ones we met were sound though - em pulled out the old 'make a chinese friend instantly' routine by practising her counting - never fails).

We split up from the other westerners when we arrived in Pingyao as we had already booked the cheapest double room we could find at 3 quid each a night - still trying to bring ourselves back into the black after the Japan spending torrent. A hard task as I made em cry this afternoon over a 4 pound bottle of wine! Bad times! But a budget is a budget and we need to stay on the right side of it otherwise we won't have any left for south america and I'll have to play my harmonica on the street whiles emily hold out a mc donalds cup for pesos.

When we got to our room we ate too much cold takeaway, fell asleep for too long and woke up too groggy - with the hot water not on till 7.30 and town wide power cut meaning a cup of tea was out of the question we decided to take to the streets. We found out after about a minute when we were accosted by a peasant 'tour guide' offering to take us round some local house and chinese medicine shops (he seemed to think or insist that that was what we wanted to do). The guy wouldn't let us alone so we spent the next half an hour - still in a daze - trying to work out if he was going to rip us off or if he was going to offer us value for money. We erred on the side of caution and held back our 10 quid - we soon found out that he was posing as Mr Lui - the legend of the guide book. And after chatting to a lady in a hostel round the corner from ours we decided to book out some bikes tomorrow and have a massage with the money we saved from not taking a tour - you know it makes sense!

So this is what 'travelling' is all about. My mind was in doubt before we left but I figured that eventually there would come a day when it would all fall into place...today was that day.

This place pingyao is just shop after shop of tat and fake antiques - just like everywhere else. The buildings are amazing though, looking forward to the bikes tomorrow. I bought an Enlgish translation of chairman mao's little red book - em was screwing when she found out - refer to previous wine incident.
Yes, today had eveything.

Chinese people spit, slurp and smell - the three S's.