Day 37

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Day 37 - Tuesday 7th October - Not too much to add but we are moving on again soon so wanted to get up to date. Got up late around midday, getting a bit too used to these lie ins. A day of sorting things out again really. Finally managed to withdraw money from my bank after 3 phone calls to HSBC. HSBC is shit and anyone reading this associated with them... you owe me at least 30quid in phone bills please. Then we thought we'd take on the mammoth task of trying to get train tickets to Shanghai sorted. To our amazement this only took a few minutes and the woman spoke perfect Englsih. We'd been promised that we'd be in for a tricky time. We booked on the 7.32pm train for the next day but they had no sleepers left so it looks like we are sitting up all night! After this we went to visit the silk market. Here there was floor after floor of obviously fake goods being sold on market stalls. As soon as the Chinese people running the stores saw our english faces we were bombarded with requests to come and look at their products. Some of them even recognised me from the day before even though it was my first time there! I decided to buy some shorts from one stall. The asking price was Y195. This is about 19quid. I offered him Y50 and the guys mood soon changed. They start accusing you of ripping them off and asking how do i think he is supposed to survive on those prices. After about 10minutes of haggling and being shouted at we settle on Y60, shake hands and then all of a sudden he is my best mate again, probably on the off chance that i may want to buy something else. I think they just overcharge massively to start and if they can make just one huge sale to one naive customer then they have a large profit for the day. Some of their tactics are a bit harsh though. At one point Adelle had 3 chinese girls literally dragging her into one of their stalls and one of the ladies looked like she was going to hit Nancy as she haggled for a t-shirt. But again, once you buy the product, it's all smiles.

Spent the rest of the evening relaxing in our hostel. We are at the Wangfujing Hostel and i can really recommend it. It's right by the Forbidden City and the staff here are extremely friendly and helpful. Besides, they do an english breakfast at all times of the day so this should be reason enough to stay. I was surprised at how clean Beijing is aswell, it was quite smoggy at times but nowhere near as bad as i thought it would be.

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