Pingyao Day 2

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Hello everybody!

Today we travelled out to the Wang household. The Wangs were the family that set up the banking industry in Pingyao, so they were ridiculously rich. Unbelievably rich actually, the residence is absolutely massive. Im pretty sure its actually bigger than the Forbidden City, and if it isn , theres definitely more buildings in there than the Forbidden City. At their peak, there were four different generations living in the complex, which was so big they needed to build a bridge to get across to the other side of the house.

When empress Cixi travelled through Pingyao, she actually stayed at this place on the way through. If you don know anything about her, look her up, its an interesting read in how much one person can be a complete cow.

Anyway, to be honest, theres not a lot to write about the place, except to say that its massive, and Ive already said that 16 times in this blog, so Im not going to repeat myself again. Not having much to write about it doesn mean that its not worth a visit though, its definitely worth a visit, its just not the sort of thing you can write a lot about.

To get there we had hired a driver (because its about 45 minutes out of the actualy walled city), and on the way back we asked if he knew any good restaurants in the area where we could have an early dinner because we hadn eaten lunch and we were getting pretty hungry by that stage since wed been walking all day through the residence. Ive finally learned something about a lot of Chinese people. Giving an answer is much more important than the accuracy of the answer. So even if they don know a good restaurant to go to, theyll suggest one they have no idea about, just so they haven seemed like they don know. Either it was that, or the guy knew the people that owned the restaurant, because this restaurant was NOT a good restaurant. It was actually gross. But we got a few good stories out of it.

Firstly, maybe the funniest actually, we ordered some potato cakes because they looked relatively harmless. In the picture in the menu, it looked OK, deep fried with seeds over it. When it came out...OK, just to let you know, Im not even slightly exaggerating this story, I promise...when it came out, it was covered in granulated sugar, and topped with hundreds and thousands. I promise thats true. Not hundreds and thousands, you know those things that are virtually the same as hundreds and thousands but they
e bars instead of little balls? Those things. Somehow they had tried to make it into a desserty kind of savoury amalgamated abomination. It was horrible. After they got served to us (it came out later, wed had a few dishes that weren special but weren too bad by then), we heard a little meow from underneath us and there was a cat trying to get some food from us. Since the potatoes were disgusting (even after scraping off all the sugar and sprinkles), I threw one down on the ground for it. Cats aren supposed to like potato cakes, but this poor thing was so hungry it would have eaten anything. It grabbed it as quick as it could and sat there trying to eat it. There seems to be a lot of feral animals around here. Im not sure if they
e abandoned or if they
e just runaways, but there is a lot of them. We made a friend out of it at least, the cat didn leave our side for the rest of the meal.

Then, we got served a salad. What a classic. It was a salad, at least inasmuch as it had all the ingredients in it, but generally, when you serve a salad, the vegetables are cut up and they
e all sort of mixed in together. This salad had whole tomatoes and whole cucumbers, and they were all in very specific spots in the bowl. We sent it back once to get the vegetables chopped up and gave up when it came back looking very much the same. Then some old ladies came and stood half a foot away from us and just stared at us for 5 minutes straight, passing comment on the way we were eating and what we were eating. They were very rude actually, so we started saying mean things about them in English, since they were talking about us in Chinese - they speak a different dialect here so Kate & Lloyd couldn understand them.

I think that was pretty much all that happened today. The house took a lot longer to visit than we had expected, so we didn get to see any of the other tourist attractions in Pingyao, but we saw the major ones, and youd need another couple of days to see them all properly. If you
e ever in China, its definitely worth the trip out here for a visit, I wouldn have missed it for the world. Im not sure if the places get more touristy in the peak peak season, but while weve been here its been great. Its actually full of French people, so if you feel like hearing a bit of French being bandied around, this is the place to go.

Tomorrow, we
e on a train again. Hard sleeper, but its during the day, so should be an interesting trip. We
e off to Datong, which is, from all accounts, the ugliest city in the world, but there are some pretty cool things to see outside of the city so Im excited!

Hope everybodys doing really well, still waiting on offers to pick us up from the station - we arrive at 10:00PM on the 21st :-)

Lloyds computers doing something weird with apostrophes at the moment, so if there are big spaces in this where it looks like there should be apostrophes, thats whatd doing it, its not my fault. Ive used more apstrophes in this sentence which is explaining the problem with the apostrophes than in any other sentence in the entire blog. What an interesting thought.

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Comments

[garrett]

hey mate where do you need to be picked up from? which station? we can get you that s no problem

[Troy]

Pickup
Hi Ray, we would love to pick you guys up! But from the airport or the station, as you said in you blog? If you want us to, send me an email and let me know. Look forward to catching up with you both!