 |
| Beijing hotel room |
The Eastern medicine tour was really interesting and amazing what they can pick up about your body by just feeling your pulse. My doctor guy was spot on with quite few things happening with my body so I got suckered into getting some magic pills, let's see if they work! After that we went and had a quick massage, relaxing it was not. At one stage the guy lifted me out of my chair by my neck, pressed so hard on my temple I though he was going to break my scull and flicked my fingers so they all cracked. Very weird experience, it certainly woke my body up but don't think Id do it again.
Once we left the medical centre we could wander around for about a couple of hours before our bus came back to collect us. We decided to find somewhere for lunch as we'd been advised by Jasmin that the food on the bullet train wasn't very nice. We found a food court in a shopping centre and picked a place that was busy and the food looked good. After working out how to order, they gave us a menu and a note pad where you just wrote down the number of the dish you wanted, we could manage that. Now to decide what to have just about everything looked good. We ended up with a noodle dish and some delicious dumpling bun things - so good and so cheap. Probably about $10 for the two of us and so filling.
Back to our meeting spot and all aboard the bus for the Beijing Train Station. We were saying goodbye to Jasmin here and meeting our new guide Amelia. Amelia was going to join us on the train as apparently this is the first tour to do the bullet train so they wanted to make sure everything went ok. Made for a long day for Amelia as she had to catch the train to Beijing and then back again. The journey was about 2 1/2 hours.
The station was huge and busy, no surprise. Before we could even get inside the station we had to show our passport and ticket and have our bags scanned. Some people had there deodorants taken from them as you can't have anything over 100ml.
Once inside Jasmin found which platform our train was going from and we all queued up. Apparently we would have about 8 minutes to get onboard and stow our luggage. This wouldn't have been so bad if there was enough room for suitcases. The bullet train isn't designed very well if you're bringing luggage with you. What a nightmare trying to find somewhere to put all our bags! Ours ended up being in the next carriage which was a bit of a worry, we did keep checking to make sure no one took them at each stop.
Mum and I weren't originally sitting next to each other but Jean who was next to mum offered to swap with me as she wasn't need her travelling buddy Joy so said it didn't matter where she sat. I was just on the otherside of the aisle and Joy was behind me.
Amelia had three groups to look after so was kept busy going up and down the carriages letting us know what was happening and when to start getting ready to get of the train. We would only have 2 minutes so she advised to get out luggage and wait in the aisle about 15 minutes before we got to Zhengzhou station. For once mum and I were one of the first off the train because our bag was in a different carriage to just about everyone else there weren't too many people getting of using the door we were at that had luggage. Everyone made it off with all their luggage so off to find our coach and head to our hotel. We were staying here for two nights.
Just a quick note: the bullet train got up to 300km/hr just about everyone got a photo of the sign. Throughout the journey it showed how fast we were going.
The hotel was about an hour from the train station so it was dark by the time we got there and very hard to see what was around us. There were some shops just down from the hotel and a convenience store. Tomorrow was a free day for us as we weren't doing the optional tour.
No comments:
Post a Comment