Pingyao in the snow

Pingyao in the snow
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January 19th, Thursday

After a great time together in Xi'an, Jo accompanied us to the small town of Pingyao in Shanxi Province. Due to the upcoming Chinese New Year half of China appears on the move and so we could only get hard sleeper tickets for the overnight train there, another interesting experience! Unlike the soft sleeper, in hard sleeper there are 6 bunks in each 'compartment' and the whole carriage without any separations (see picture). So it made for quite a social way of travelling, let alone catching sleep! :-) We caught some nevertheless and arrived early in the morning in city covered in 3 inches/9 cm of snow! Everything looked very beautiful and made the ancient houses the city is famous for look even more amazing. We checked into a very nice hotel (an old restored town house) and went for an explore of the various town houses. Once upon a time the city was the heart of the Chinese banking world with one of the bank running more than 50 branches all over China. That's why the city grew very rich and many houses ended up very posh! So we had a great time wondering through some of the restored and snow-covered yards. We also visited a very old Confucius temple where the Imperial exams for accountants used to be taken, and a temple for the town god, which was a bit gruesome... . Since it was freezing, we enjoyed sipping tea and having dinner at our hotel in the evening. As it happened a film crew stopped by and intereviewed Jo for a program about Pingyao!

Pingyao city wall
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January 20th, Friday

We started the day by exploring the Pingyao City wall which offered good views across the city and looked very dramatic all covered in snow. The rest of the day we spent wandering in the streets (unfortunately only the main streets have been restored but maybe that's good as there are a frightening number of gift shops already!), reading a bit and chatting to one of the towns guides. At around 5 we had to say good-bye to Jo who had to head back to Xi'an. Not too much later we also had to catch our train, to Beijing, back on soft sleeper :-)