The First Leg of Our Trip

Hello to all of you who have been missing us! Carol and I have had a whirlwind of a trip for the past week. This post is about the Beijing part of the journey. We left Changzhou on Sunday evening at 6:30 and arrived in Beijing about 8:30. The first part of the trip was pretty uneventful until we were in the taxi heading for our hostel. As we proceded through the streets of Beijing and continued past the nicer part of town to the poorer and poorer sections, Carol began to get pretty concerned about where we were going to stay. I assured her that my flatmate Barbara gave the hostel a good recommendation. When the taxi driver didn't seem to know where he was going and I had to phone the manager for directions, her concerns increased. By the time the driver turned down into what appeared to be an alleyway in a questionable area, I thought I was going to lose Carol for sure. It turned out that we were staying in the Hutong area (Jim, remember?), which is a very old area of Beijing. I kept reassuring Carol and we finally arrived in the hostel. Carol was sure that we would not survive until morning. (At least we had a bathroom in our room). Upon awakening in the morning and looking out into the courtyard, Carol felt a tiny bit better. By the time a couple of days had passed, she was walking confidently down the tiny little roadway and catching buses right alongside me. We found that the people who lived up and down the street were very friendly and always greeted us as we passed. We went to Tiannemen Square, The Forbidden City, The Summer Palace, (can you believe these beautiful fowers?) and the Great Wall!We even found McDonalds for that all important cup of coffee and we ate Peking Duck!

At the end of the 3 days, our waggins were draggin.

By the time we were ready to leave Beijing for the next leg of the journey Carol decided that the Hostel wasn't nearly as bad as she had first thought and we actually enjoyed our time there. :) We had to take the overnight train all the way to Shanghai since the hostel manager couldn't get us tickets back to Changzhou. Carol is hugging her pillow an getting ready to settle in for the night. When she gets home she will have all sorts of things to tell you gals at OSU about that train ride!!
When we arrived at Shanghai, we couldn't get a train back to Changzhou so we had to hire a taxi for the 3-hour trip. That cost us a whopping 765 RMB!! But we made it back by 10:30 am on Thursday and our bus wasn't scheduled to leave for Hangzhou until 1:00 that afternoon. We had a whole two hours to get our backpacks unpacked and repacked for the next two legs of our trip.

Well, that's enough for tonight. I must get to bed since I have to go back to school in the morning. More to come later.