Beijing Trip cont’d
So it turns out Leah got food poisoning. And I’m still sneezing and coughing and i still have a runny nose : (
So we ended up postponing our Xi’an trip for when Leah felt better.
Yesterday we did very little since Leah was bedridden all day. We went back to Tianmen Square to see the National Museum, which ended up being under construction : ( so we went someplace to eat, and then after some great difficulty, grabbed a taxi to BeiHai park again to finally see the Pagoda….which was closed off. We were late by 30 minutes. But we took photos near and around the thing.
I should also mention that it was deathly cold out. anyways, we spent over an hour trying to get a taxi from that area, finally caught a taxi that didn’t turn us down or already had someone in it, and got back, exhausted.
Leah was feeling a little better, we ordered food at the Hostel and stayed in for the night.
Today, We decided that Xi’an will have to wait, because of the hassle and the headache of findinf cheap enough flights or train tickets. We settled on going another time. I think I’ll go later in the year when the weather is nicer and much warmer.
Today we made reservations to see a Kung-Fu show, went and got myself some chinese medicine and went to the Antique Market in Panjieyuan. I bought some old illustrated short stories from the 80s and Gavin bought some limited edition Mao playing cards, a tea pot, some other stuff and me and him paid a lady to inscribe our chinese names into stamps for us. She’s using the old writing, so it should look really pretty.
While waiting, we went to eat congee and afterwards, came back to find the market closed. Apparently the woman waited for us to come back but had to close her stall and she didn’t have the key. we’ll have to get our stamps another day.
Bad luck struck again when we tried in vain AGAIN to get a taxi. it took us so long to find one and finally when we did, there was some confusion, we left Leah and Brittney on the road and wasted even more time trying to grab them and get them into our taxi. We had about 10 minutes to get back to the Hostel to get picked up to go to the Kung-Fu show.
Did I mention it was RUSH HOUR?!? suffice to say, an hour later we were nowhere near home and I had to go to the washroom. We found a subway station, ditched the cab, took that, and ran back to our Hostel. By this time we had verifiably missed the show. We moved our reservations to tomorrow, and are now having dinner again at the hostel.
THE END! the saga of bad planning and horrible taxis continues!