Hotel Beijing

In order to be as organised as possible we spent much of the morning deciding on our exact itinerary for the rest of China so that we could book all of our train tickets at once. When I finally went up to book them we ran into several problems. First of all, the trains were fully booked on the day we wanted to go to Shanghai. Secondly I was told that they could not book any of the other tickets; only tickets originating in Beijing. Back to the drawing board.

We looked at flying but it would have cost far too much. We asked about the bus but that was fully booked as well. We considered going part of the way a day earlier and then travelling to Shanghai the intended day, but those routes were fully booked as well. We gave up on the eclipse and tried to book trains to Shanghai a day later, in time for Joanne's birthday which was our original plan, but those were fully booked as well. We considered switching the route around and going to Xi'an in time for Joanne's birthday, then Shanghai afterwards, but the trains to Xi'an were all booked up as well. In the end we just asked how long we would have to wait in Beijing to get a train to Shanghai, but they couldn't tell us that. Apparently we should have booked ten days previously... but we were in Japan at the time and we wouldn't have been able to book! We were trapped in Beijing!

Finally we tried asking about the bus to Shanghai after Joanne's birthday but we were told that they couldn't book bus tickets. Earlier in the day a different staff member had looked up buses online for us, but he seemed to have disappeared. There was no bus information online; we couldn't even find out which bus station (there are about 15) to go to, to ask about tickets. All the information we could find simply said that Beijing transport was simple: flying is cheap and the trains are excellent. Approaching desperation Joanne phoned a tourist information line, only to receive a recorded message in Chinese, a trick clearly taken out of the Japanese book of tourism! Joanne asked the girl on duty at the hostel if she would phone the number and decipher the message; it was a message saying that the number had changed. She called the new number, but discovered that “tourist information” meant “booking hotels”, so we were stumped again. Maybe seeing our desperation, or wanting to get us out of the common area, the girl asked what we were trying to achieve now and offered to phone a bus station for us. I wasn't the express bus we had been hoping to get, but she was able to reserve us overnight tickets to Shanghai the day after Joanne's birthday, over the phone; and they were going to deliver the tickets to the hostel.

At last some progress! Our arrival in Shanghai assured, we sent off several batches of Couchsurfing requests to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou; although we couldn't book tickets for the latter two, we had been assured that there are plenty of trains, so no need to book in advance. This had taken almost the entire day and during that time we had got talking to Sue, an Australian woman in her fifties who periodically went travelling without her husband, as he didn't enjoy it much. She sympathised with our difficulties as she had run into the same ones. In Suzhou, though, she told us, the ticket office there had been very helpful and allowed her to book all the rest of her rail tickets from anywhere in the country. We looked forward to being able to remove the anxiety of no onward transport.

Testicles and other lovely organs

Sue had just arrived in Beijing and asked if she could tag along to the Night Market with us to get some food from the stalls. We passed on the sheep penis, centipede, water beetles, longhorn beetles, bee cocoon, testicles, and other organs, settling for some disappointing and over-priced spring rolls and dumplings. Maybe Snack Street was the place to go after all; the food there had been cheaper at least.

Bee cocoon, beetles, centipede, "sheep penis", etc

Sun through the pollution

written by  The Happy Couple on July 21, 2009 from Beijing, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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