Pinyao, so many museums, so little... in them

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Blogs are like buses, you wait for ages and then.....

Early the next morning (have you noticed how many early mornings we’re doing, its worse than going to work you know!) We got the slowest taxi in town to the bus station, where we boarded a rickety old bus to Taiyuan for the connecting bus to Pingyao, an ancient Ming dynasty walled banking city which has remained relatively untouched and is now a major tourist attraction as all the Qing dynasty architecture exits much as it was.

After Dan took charge and organized motorcycle rickshaws for us and the other westerners on the bus, we put-putted into town and settled into the hostel (Harmony Guesthouse - really friendly and helpful, with big clean rooms). The afternoon was spent wandering the backstreets. Cars are banned from the centre of the city as are neon signage and white tiles so as we meandered it was like wandering back in time, this place really is like a living museum, the only thing that made it modern were the other groups of meandering tourists snapping away like crazy with their SLRs. The elderly residents and children of this place must be some of the most photographed people in the world!

There had been a few interesting food experiences up to this point, what with the random menu selections and picture menus that don’t quite resemble what you are going to get but we stopped for a meal of broiled chicken and mushrooms with rice for dinner. Can’t go wrong with that right? The food arrived, a large bowl of steaming soup with chicken and mushrooms and some pak choi on the top, all was good until Claire lifted a piece of pak choi to reveal the head of the chicken winking up at her! On further investigation, most of the rest of the chicken was in there (only the feet missing sadly). The head, I’m glad to report, was very tasty! (only joking, I went to eat it but its tongue sticking out put me off, it would have been like French kissing a chicken and there’s only one ‘bird’ for me!)

We spent a couple of days exploring the temples and museums here, probably a little too long as the museums are all very similar and not very exciting unless you are into banking and can read Chinese. You have to buy a tourist ticket for the whole town so you get entry to everything (even if you only want to visit one museum) so we felt we ought to make best use of it. The ticket did include a seat at the nightly Chinese dance and opera show which was pretty good - the costumes were amazing, although the story was essentially Romeo and Juliette, with a ‘banking’ theme!!

It was an enjoyable couple of days and we departed for the night train to Xi’an with some fellow travellers we had met at the hostel.

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Photos

Peek a boo!
Cheeky Chicken says hello!