Hi Guys，

Sooooo our last night in Xi'an, we were off for a Dumpling Banquet. The resturant next door was a place that specialised in this, so it was nice we didn't have too far to go. There were over 18 courses of dumpling and you really needed to keep a steady pace or you wouldn't have any room for the next course. They did fried, boiled or stemed dumpling each with different flavours. They would arrive with 3 or 4 courses together in there little bamboo style circular baskets. There were about 12-16 dumpling in each course. They were really yummy, there had pork, duck, vegtables, beef, prawn and so on and so on. There were lots of mixtures as well, like pork and vegtables, lots of flavours to try. My favourite was the duck- which they shaped into a duck and the vegtable one which was dyed green. They all looked really different as well. The chicken one was shaped like a chicken and they had green ones which were yummy and purple ones as well all different shapes and sizes. I wish I could find a computer that would upload my pictures quickly. It was a great evening out for the group and we were all pretty stuffed by the end of it. The meal is finished off by having a special dumpling soup. Tiny dumplings are placed into a huge pot in the middle of your table and is lit and you watch it bubble away. You then serve it up, the tiny dunpling that are in the soup are meant to bring you luck. So when you get your soup, you have to check you soup to see how lucky you are. I had one L, Darren had 3 J. We had an early night as we were going to be getting a 15hr day train tomorrow.

Now I forgot a funny story to tell you that happened in Beijing. On our second day Darren had been chatting to one of the group and I had popped up to our room to go to the loo. However Darren being a bit special came up the stairs and knocked on the room next to ours by mistake. A woman shouted out hallo (in a chinese accent), Mr Scott thought I was taking the mick and imitated it back at her thinking it was me. Anyway this happened a couiple of times with Darren taking the mick each time he said before this woman opened the door. As you imagine Darren was horrified and apologised before knocking on our door. I however had been in our room listening and quietly laughing to myself the whole time.

I also forgot to say on my first night in Beijing i was getting ready for bed and put my monster munch tshirt. Me and brother ebing super cool have matching tshirts which we were to bed. Sadly my tshirt didn't seem to fit until i sadly realised i had forgotten mine and brought my brothers L.

Anyway moving on. We left Xi'an and boarded our day train to Yi Chang. It was very long and very boring, most of the group eat noodles on the train as there is boiling water availble on the train. Darren and I have also managed to have sandwiches. Two types of sandwiches in particular cheese and ham or peanut butter. I have fallen in love with Skippy a certain brand of PB, cheese and ham are quite hard to find so it sometimes is a struggle to get them. The supermarkets are a little bizarre as they don't have refriderated sections with yogurts, cheese etc in them, its only big supermarkets that have this. So it can someimtes be hit or miss to find it. Most shops have lots of dried or packeted foods, however there are loads of bakery's everywhere you go. This is great as we can get fresh bread when we need it and they have lots of other savory or sweet items. They like a lot of meat in their foods in the bakery but its so cheap we can afford to try it out and bin it if we don't like it. Anyway so that is the food side of it back to the train.

The train was long and filled with playing card games, we got to Yi Chang about midnight (trains hardly ever run on time in getting to their destinations). We were shattered and looked forward to getting to bed.

The next day there wasn't a lot of time so we went and got our food supply for our boat trip (sadly we did have to get noodles) and we spent some time in tracking some cheese down for sandwiches. The mandarins over here a lovely and juciy so we have been eating a lot of those. Sadly no PG tips but we have found something that is tea like- ish. I have said before about kids with holes in their trousers, well in the supermarket a little boy weed all over the floor. The parent laughed and carried on normal -WEIRD!. I can't really imagine that happening over in the U.K. Also the flavours of crisps are really weird like lemon tea flavour or refreshing cucumber or blueberry!! WEIRD!! After tracking down the cheese we headed off to a flower show in a park just down the road from the hotel. It was lovely and hot and we spend a good couple of hours wandering round this lovely park. Lots of people meet to play cards in the local spots. Its lovely to see old and young people all huddled round tables playing for hours on end. We then met up with the group to get a bus to the boat. When we arrived at the port the whole of the room turned round to look at us and I mean the wholeee room. It was really bizarre I have encountered people staring at me and have been asked to have pictures with people but this time the whole room was looking at our group. Its normally young people who get excited to see us but not this time, we all felt like we were in a zoo.

After being stared at for about an hour we were able to board the boat. Darren has really started to take the mick out of people as they don't understand him, so he was saying hello and making fun of peoples hats etc. Anyway, the boat was nice enough basic but nice. Although the toilet is very small and the shower is right above it, so effectively the whole topilket gets soaked when you use the shower. We had our first noodle and were sick of them already, luckily we did have sandwiches for lucnh tomoz. We had a couple of beers and card games with the group befopre heading to bed.

Sadly there were mudslides a few days before we got on the boat and this meant we were taking a differnt route. It meant we wouldn't be going past the hanging coffins where the monks are L. Instead we walked up more steps to see the 'White Emperor's Temple'. It was ok a nice view but not as good as what we would have been seeing. The boat over all was a little disappointing, beautiful secnery to look at but this was only good for a hour or two. The secenery is these huge moutains either side of the boat that go on for miles, it's lovely to look at this but only for a while before your seeing the same thing over and over. Also we didn't get to see the Gorge Dam as it's on military land and you have to pay to see it. It's the largest dam in the world, so again a bit disappointing. However Frank did say if they was a war and the dam got bombed it would wipe out all of South East China.

So the boat was a bit rubbish the highlight of this boat was the rat. One night Darren and I our having a nice chat in our room in bed and all of a sudden we hear the girl next doors laughing, then they screamed. At first we were like what have the silly sods done now but when they screamed we jumped out of bed to get to the door. However before we got to the door Helen and Lee were at ours banging on the door to let them in. It would appear a rat had tried to make friends with them in their room. We then spend some time looking for the rat before the girls bunked down in another room. Highly amusing the next day.

The next day we were off the boat at 7am to have a full day of travelling-rubbish. This started by a 6 hour bus journey, we had two break one for lunch and one as the buses had to be swapped over. I wasn't feeling great and dosed myself up tp try and sleep it off. This wasn't helped by the bus going the bumpiest route known to man kind. We wre literally all coming off our seats when he hit a pot hole. I even went up so high one time I smacked my head on the way back down. Once our bus ride was over we then had to waits 3 hrs in the station for our train. The group headed to KFC for some grub. Sadly chinese KFC just isn't up to scratch for me. We eventually boarded our delayed train. As we were going through the gate some chinese woman was shouting directly in front of my face with a megaphone- who knows what she was saying. We ignored her and carried on walking.

The train that night was the worst by far. It was another overnight train but sadly we were all split up as we couldn't get buncks together. I had Darren above me and Helen above Darren. I'll keep this next bit brief. On the other side of the compartment was the most vile man known to man kind. He started off by clipping his toe nails and picking at his feet then through the night he was getting up, spitting for two hours straight, burping, farting and eating his noodle like a wild animal. I have never seen anyone so horrific. Darren and I were disgusted. He was making me gag as he was sitting at the seat opposite my bed doing it. I had to put my ipod in and cover my ears!!. Safe to say Darren and I were ready to leave China after that. All the rude people in China were getting too much. However the saving grace was our next stop.Yangshou. A lovely little touristy places with makrtes, places to eat and bars. It is surronded by mountains and is very realxing and much quieter than the other places we had been. We could cross the road without the fear of being taken out and so on. The day started off by having eggs on toast with bacon at the the hotel. This was amazing as everywhere other place we had been to they didn't do western style breakfast. Aater this the group set off (it was only 8:30 as our train got in at 7am) to have walk around while our rooms were being prepared. Then after we had checked in Darren and I wentt back to the market to explore. The little streets are filled with places to eat and we found a great little pizza place for lunch. Yep we had pizza not chinese to eat. That afternoon we were going to school-cooking school!! We went to the food market. I could only go so far in the food market as they had dogs/rabbits in cages and dead dogs that were being cut up etc and I couldn't look! There would literally be killing the chickens, dogs etc right in front of the customers for their freshness! *gag* We then went to a kitchen of a restaurant we each made 3 meals, Pork and veg dunplings, sweet and sour pork and a chicken dish called something liike kompong. All very yummy and seriously good fun. Debbie our teacher was great and it was definately a highlight to the trip. After we made it all, we then got to eat it!! Such good fun.

That night we as a group all went out for drinks to a place called Monkey Janes that has a roof top bar. We are really lucky with our group as they are all hilarious and really good fun. We spent a good 5 hours at this bar playing the drinking game with hilarious results as i threw in a couple of my rules from how I play it before we bowed out and went back for some sleep. We were very noisy but it was such a laugh, we even had a group of lands from Manchester, Liverpool and Ireland join us by the end of it. We headed home to get an earlish night (it was after midnight after all-thats kinda early). On our first day here our toilet had been leaking everywhere and we had to have a new pipe fitted but everything was ok after that. However when Darren got up in the night he found that the door to the toilet had locked itself and no matter what we did, we couldn't get it open again. Even more hilarious the guy that was doing the night shift in the hotel didn't speak a word of English so Darren had to use actions to describe what was going on. He got it though and it was soon fixed up. A little bit of a weird night but all ended well.

Which brings me to this morning. Darren and I didn't want to take part in the group activity so we had a lazy breakfast before heading to climb some of the lime stone moutnains that surronded us. Lots more steps! There were lots of little paths and rocks to climb. We even found on one of our climbs a man sleeping inside one of the little caves. We wandered in and I thought about climbing down there but it was so dark. So we used our camera's to shine some light down there. I saw a bag in the corner and then we both heard someone snoring. A little freaky but we decided to get out of there pronto incase we woke him up. A little bizarre to find a man sleeping in a cave, as we turned to leave we found a little bowl in one corner of the cave as well. The views were beautiful as we had a lovely morning walking round this quiet, lovely park and watching people play cards. It was a great great day, after this we went and got some Skippy for our sandwiches before taking a nap. Tonight we are going back our for pizza with the group (Darren and I only shared a pizza yday, so it's not that bad). Then we are going to head to the market again. It's cheap here but not as cheap compared to the markets in Xi'an.

One thing I feel i should mention is that everywhere we go 'Old Lang Syne; gets played or 'The Bells of St Clemence". It verys weird they love it, oh and christmas songs were being played on the train!! What is up with that!

Anyway time to sign off now. We head to Hong Kong tomorrow evening should be awesome esp as it was owned by us for a very long time.

Joshie I love you, that spork you got me is brilliant, I have used it so much- nearly every day. I would be lost without it.

Also thanks guys for leaving me messages on my blog its lovely to read them. Write as many as you want as often.

Love Me and D- Dawg ( a ridiculous nickname given to him by Helen -the irish one).

xxx