The morning after the night before was a bit painful, particularly for Erik who was suffering from the after effects of his 35 shots. Erik and I just about made it out of the hotel by check out time and made our way to Charles' apartment to meet up with the girls.
We all headed to get some food; this was made somewhat challenging by the fact that the restaurant we chose only had a chinese menu. While Steph speaks Mandarin and Priscilla speaks Cantonese, neither of them can read Chinese. After a long discussion with the waitress we were able to order some dim sum and everything turned out well with the exception of some sesame balls that we seemed to have mistaken for some other type of dumpling. In any case I have been very grateful to have the girls language skills - I think we would have starved by now otherwise!
After lunch we took a taxi to the summer palace which is a big ornamental garden built by the emperors outside the city. On the way we got to see the main Olympic sites - the athletics center (aka the birds nest) and the aquatics center. They were both very impressive even from a distance. We have all been impressed by how much the city has embraced the olympics - it seems like every building and street carries the logo.
The summer palace was a huge park with many impressive buildings. Three quarters of the park is taken up by a big lake with paths winding all around. We quickly realized that we would not have enough time to see everything so we headed off towards the large pagoda on the hill overlooking the lake. I decided to take the lead which was a mistake as in no time we were off the main path clambering up through trees. Priscilla was only wearing flip flops so this was not ideal, however it was actually me who went sprawling after I tripped up. Eventually we made it to the top and I was forgiven for my poor directions as I had also inadvertently managed to circumvent the main entrance and therefore the entrance fee! At the top we saw a big buddha and also got a great view of the park with the temples and lake and the city in the distance.
Afterwards we headed back to Charles' place to get showered and packed, ready to catch our night train to Xi'an. We also had a last meal with Charles at Jing Da Fong, a Taiwanese dumpling place. We tried a number of different dumplings all of which were delicious. My favorite was the shrimp and pork dumplings. We all agreed that it was our second favorite meal after the duck the night before.
By this stage we were cutting it extremely close to make it in time for our train. Fortunately our taxi driver drove like a maniac in order to ensure we made it on time. We were all excited at the prospect of our train ride. We had assumed that we would all be sharing a room but it turned out that we had four top bunks in two separate rooms beside each other and would be sharing with 2 random people in each room. We tried to persuade our roommates to move so we could share but apparently the chinese prefer the bottom bunks so they didn't want to move. Steph and I were sharing with the more sociable people. We met one guy who was returning home to Xi'an after 2 years in Morocco. We realized this after thinking he was talking about Mongolia for the first 15 minutes, finally catching on when he started talking about being able to swim to Spain which seemed highly improbable from Mongolia! He was very friendly and chatted away with Steph, he even pulled out his laptop to show us some of his photos from Morocco.
After chatting for a while it was time to clamber in to our bunks for sleep. The bunks were pretty plush, they even had mini tvs like you get on a plane. Unfortunately everything was in Chinese, so we didn't really put these to use. The beds were rock hard like everywhere in China but the gentle sway of the train meant we were off to sleep in no time.
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