It’s raining! Thankfully we are leaving Wuhan today and heading up to Beijing! The weather up there looks clear, sunny, and warm all weekend while it is supposed to rain all weekend here in Wuhan. We packed up this morning for our trip and I am pretty impressed with myself. I am 100% an over packer. I like to bring everything I can! Well…I packed it all into my backpack! It is just more convenient to only have to take that with so hopefully I don’t buy too much because I don’t have much room left.
We only had our morning class this morning so we were able to buy train tickets for 3:00 pm. The university is holding some sort of campus wide lecture so they cancelled our afternoon class. This is going to make our weekend in Beijing longer so we can do more! After class we headed back to the hotel quickly to change and grab our stuff. We were planning on taking a taxi to the subway to get to the train station but luckily Wendy dropped us off at the subway instead. This took one step out of our public transportation adventure! We are, however, getting pretty good at this public transportation thing! Luckily, the students wrote out all of our steps again in English and Chinese in case we have any troubles.
Once we got to the train station we had no idea what to do. It looked really different than any other train station we had been in thus far. Taylor hoped someone spoke English and decided to ask a young guy for help. She knows how to pick them! He knew perfect English and helped us find our way. We decided to eat at Burger King before we got into our waiting area. Not so good…I would take McDonalds or KFC over that any day here. We finally found our gate and our train was delayed! We had no idea it was delayed but as we were standing in line Taylor again found a girl to ask and she was waiting for the same train. She also knew perfect English and helped us so much! Our train ended up being about 1 ½ hours late. This sucked…I think it was worse than waiting for a delayed flight. Especially not knowing any of the language, we had no idea what was going on.
We finally made it to Beijing! Since our train was delayed we got in quite a bit later than planned. It also felt like a really long train ride! The thing that makes them so long are all the stops in between. It seems like the train stops every 30 minutes at the stops to pick up and drop off. It gets a little old. Once we got to the train station, we went to McDonalds to get dinner (around 10 pm). They were pretty much out of everything and I didn’t get anything. Taylor got some chicken sampler that included a few different things and Art and Jim got these green breakfast type sandwiches. They said it wasn’t to bad but I think I will pass myself.
We got into a taxi and headed off to our hotel! We stayed at a Holiday Inn Express and let me tell you…It was really nice staying in an American chain hotel. We at least had some trust in it. Well check in went really smoothly and Taylor and I headed up to the 7th floor for our room. As we rounded the corners in the hotel we realized that our room was practically in the back corner. Well…I walk up to put the key in…and the door was open! It had the door latch in the door so it wouldn’t close and the room was dark! Needless to say Taylor and I freaked out just a little bit and headed back down to the lobby. We tried to explain to the front desk what had just happened but it took a little bit. He finally switched us to a room on the 8th floor and was really nice and walked us up to it to make sure this one was ok. The room wasn’t super nice but it was perfect. The AC worked perfectly and we had 1 English station on the TV…CNN. We caught up on our news as we got ready for bed and just went to sleep.
We had an early morning tour booked for the next day and a breakfast to look forward too. Going to bed with the hopes of hot coffee in the morning and some western breakfast was a good feeling!
-Jami-
Jami and Taylor 