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Published: August 19th 2006
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i woke up at 6.30 or so and started with some coffee and cookies again. after an inspection of the bathroom, i decided that i could skip the shower. just brushing the teeth next to this stinking hole that's supposed to be the toilet actually was unpleasant enough.
then i went to the train station and without any problems got on the train to pingyao. i had a bed, which was quite useless, since i wenty away at 9 in the morning and the journey did not even take 2 hours. i seated myself next to the window and was busy with watching the landscape, reading, making travelplans when a cheery looking chinese started waving at me and showed me that i could sit right next to him. so i did. soon we found out that we were speaking different languages and that this could make problems in our communication. hm, i'm not sure if he really realized that because he just kept on telling me things in chinese. when i showd that i couldn't understand he just drew the chinese signs with his finger on the palm of his hand. finally he even showed me an id card that seemed
to say he was someone special. i nodded impressed. we were relieved from this unfortunate situation by another guy who took my lonely planet and started reading. in the back there are some phrases and so he could ask me some questions. he put the lonely planet aside and took my "war and peace" but he didn't like this one as much and asked me for another book. i gave him my chinese phrase book and we started to "talk". they taught me some phrases and how to pronounce them right. for example "i love china". of course most of it, i forgot already in the meantime but still it was a very nice journey. at one point the first gut started to eat nuts and offered me some. when i agrees he filled the right pocket of my trouser completely. i still have quite a few of them and eat them from time to time.
in pingyao i was of course soon picked up by a woman to show me a room to sleep. she spoke english very good and so i agreed to have a look. they brought me into the inner city of pingyao which is surrounded
by the old city wall by one of these bikers. the guesthouse looked very nice and also the guy there who was cooking at this moment seemed to be nice and spoke english well. i told him that i would prefer a dormitory because that would be cheaper and he said they have no dormitory bed left but soon there would arrive some people and we probably could arrange something. however, these guys never arrived. i got a two bed room with bath and air condition for 80 RMB which is really ok but i wouldn't have needed all this luxury. well, at least i could take a shower now.
then i started into the city. it's a really lovely city, at least inside the old city wall, which looks very nice. guess, this time i manged to make some photos that give at least some impression of the city (you'll have to wait some time for them, can't upload them now). here in pingyao you could find quite a few westerners also. from time to time they would appear as a bright piece of skin or hait in the mass of chinese. when you would take a closer look
they would either stare into the face of some local to understand what he wanted to tell them or they would look admiring at some piece of architecture. looking at them i started thinking if i would look the same. i decided that most probably i did and that it didn't matter.
after walking through the city the whole day i became hungry and went to the place proposed in lonely planet. it was a very decent and cheap meal. again the waitress proposed to use the spoon and again i refused. i really want to learn to use the chop sticks, but it seems i'm not really progressing when it comes to this.
afterwards i went back to the guesthouse and took a rest. i went out again when it was dark cause i thought it could be interesting to see this city at night. i took my mp3-player with me and listened to pink mountaintops (actually walking on streets in china while listening to music is not the the best idea since you don't hear all the honking that should warn you, but actually they're honking all the time so that you can't say if you should be
alarmed or not and who cares about safety anyway). i made the observation that pingyao at night is quite tha same as pingyao by the just that it's dark, which means that you can't leave the streets without shops because they are the only ones who make some light. thus, i went back after a while and listened to nick cave while peacefully fading out.
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