Star attraction

This morning we met the group at 7.30am (!) to go to the Forbidden City. Susan said this was best; because it's Golden Week there was the chance that half of China would be there too. The Forbidden City, or the 'Working People's Cultural Palace' as the Chinese like to call it (nowhere is it referred to as the 'Forbidden City') is to the North of Tiananmen Square (which, according to Susan is the site of the '1989 accident.' I'll say no more). Already by 8am it was packed. I think a lot of people from the smaller towns are on holiday in Beijing and being a group of Western faces we were quite the star attraction, complete with (for added novelty value) an English speaking Chinese person. People were not only staring and hurriedly gathering children closer to have a look and listen but were actually surreptitiously filming and taking photographs. They did occasionally ask various members of the group to pose with them (including one young boy who asked Matt to have his picture with him - I had a small cameo appearance later in the day when another teenage boy asked to pose with both of us). Jean, the older lady in our group with light hair, turned out to be the star of the show as numerous children clung to her for photos. We lasted about an hour in the Forbidden City as you just couldn't move for people. We headed back to the hotel and concluded that Golden Week isn't the best time to visit China. Later in the day as we were in the shopping district searching desperately for a much needed Mandarin phrasebook we were stopped on more than one occasion by people wanting to practise their English. One young man had a list of sentences and words he wanted us to explain including 'to cajole', 'camouflage' and 'to buck the trend.' Slightly bizarre, we did wonder his ulterior motive as after half an hour he tried to get us to go with him to his 'place of study' somewhere. I suspect he, along with most people, was just wanting to make a living and sell us something.

We met up with the rest of the group and were taken to the train station where we were catching an overnight train to Xi'an. Now over the past few weeks we have experienced our fair share of train stations but this one was the best by far. By 'best' I mean, busiest, hottest, sweatiest, grimiest in terms of toilets alone. There were literally hundreds of people queuing and that was just for our train. We boarded the train; we were in 'hard sleeper' which is a carriage of say 10 open compartments (not close-door cabins we have previously had). Each compartment had 6 beds, a top, middle and bottom bunk. It was a tight squeeze especially when you add all our luggage into the equation.