Today was my last day at work and although I had a good day it was quite sad to be leaving. I taught some groovy lessons and then at the end of the day took a video of the kids. Vincent had taken me to work by Ebike so I could video the trip! We went quite late on after 9.00 as I had a late start just after 10.00, this did mean it wasn’t as full of craziness as usual but it was a good amount of bikers to be videoing so I didn’t have to worry about falling off the bike – or being pushed off.
After work Vincent came and collected me and told me he had managed to post most of our parcel home, but they made him unpack it all and take out the bottles, so we had to do a bit of a luggage rearrange, then say goodbye and a big thank you to Paul and Kelly.
We managed to wheel our very cool rucksacks to the end of the road and get a cab for the train station. The rucksacks have been so useful and we are very glad we got the high end ones as we have stuffed them full of things and dragged them around loads, not really very gentle treatment and I’m sure lesser ones would have given up on us by now.
When we got to the station we had plenty of time to look around and I decided that if we were on our way out of China I had to have veggie dumplings one more time – although after making them at new year’s I’m sure we’ll try it when we get home. When the train arrived we had quite a long trek up and down stairs to get to the platform, but that didn’t matter as I’m now master of the stairs and can do them quite well – sadly it does mean poor Vincent gets a rucksack on his back and two huge wheelie rucksacks to carry.
The train cabin was amazing. The beds were long enough and even though we had top bunks so getting me up there was a bit of a chore, when I was up – I was up! There were two pillows and a duvet provided for each bunk and the two Chinese people below us seemed not to be murderers or anything  Of course as I had predicted to Paul only a few hours before I did manage to get the bunk over the old man who snored louder than the train so I didn’t sleep very well, but the comfort was there and the 10 hour journey flew by.
The first thing we did was go to the buffet car for dinner. In the usual way of the Chinese the choice was meat, meat or an omelette and boiled rice. We opted for the latter. The food wasn’t bad but the best thing was they served ‘Great Wall’ a terrible white wine that would make any reasonable person demand their money back. Of course we drank the whole bottle. After the hideous wine that Kelly’s Grandma had lovingly provided me with not to far back (She was told I didn’t drink beer so bought local ‘wine’ an off brown liquid carefully made of old boots then decanted through a pair of old socks, but not filtered so it had all the bits if boot in it!) I wasn’t so fussy.
I was awake for a while at the end of the journey and was very glad my phone, although not functioning in China, is also a walkman with a gig of songs on. We got up and tried to get dressed – the train was supremely heated to about 25 degrees, which seemed like an oven after the freezing cold of Suzhou, so we had both taken off the top few layers. We glided into the station at Beijing, cunningly named ‘Beijing station’ those cunning Chinese 
Vincent had booked us into a hotel, which strangely advertised a room with no windows. So we got in a taxi, had the usual rubbish of the first few drivers looking blank and shaking heads then the one we took doing a round trip of the city rather than just going the short distance, but we had decided to fit quite a lot in and I didn’t want to get worn out trekking to a hotel, when the forbidden city was right outside the door.