Day 20

Unfortunately we had run out of things to do in Xi'an and our train was not until Wednesday, so the majority of the day was spent at the hostel researching and planning our itineraries Beijing and Vietnam.

We went for dinner in a filthy restaurant in the Muslim Quarter. The waitress placed two dishes on the table, one I recognised as mine and the other Daley thought was his, so he poured himself a small bowl of the dish. A few minutes later, the waitress brought another bowl to the table and began to apologies profusely. Obviously a mistake had been made so we told the waitress it was fine and asked her to take the unordered dish away, which she didn't. Come bill time they just added the extra dish on without consultation. I lost my patience with Chinese people trying to rip us off a while ago so there was no way we were going to let them get away with it. After a lengthy debate he finally accepted defeat but the little swine had one last trick up his sleeve. As we found out later, he had given me a fake note with our change. I was furious and wanted to go back and put him through the front window of his restaurant but I managed to get rid of it in the hostel bar later that evening and felt very smug about it too.

I took the beers purchased with fake Yuan, handed one to Daley, took one for myself, and set about hammering a group of locals at table football.