Breakfast was much quieter this morning, thank goodness! Amelia told us later on that she had made a complaint to her company about the hotel regarding the noise and a few other issues that had popped up. I guess if it's a new tour they're doing some of the places they stay at must me new to them as well. Amelia said she wasn't impressed with the hotel at all. We didn't mind it except for the breakfast.
Before the train we went to the Henan museum. This was interesting but just so much information to take in that I never remember anything. I do remember they had nice clean western toilets which we all used!
Next stop was Zhengzhou train station. It's a massive place, Zhengzhou is known as the transport capital of China (Beijing is the political and Shanghai is the business capital). We all had our train tickets and passports ready to show and our bags scanned again. I bought some snacks for the train as this was a 4 1/2 hour trip, need something to keep us going.
The train got up to 340km/hr this time. So fast! A pretty uneventful trip. It was still eye opening to pass through some of the cities and see how big they are. So many new apartment blocks going up. As we didn't have a guide with us on this train trip, Amelia left us and our new guide was meeting us at the station, a couple of the guys were freaking out about getting off the train. Amelia had said we had 2 minutes so this sent then into a tizz I think. About 2 hours before we were due to arrive in Suzhou they were planning what to do and pretty much didn't stop talking about it the rest of the way. They were starting to worry some of the older ones on our tour and annoy me. Everyone made it off the train with their luggage.
JZ was waiting at the station, he was one of the guides, and was instructing everyone on where to go and what to do but as usual some people don't listen so start doing there own thing. Luckily the guides were quite forceful when it came to listening and doing that they say. Our guide Hans was waiting just on the other side of the ticket gate so of course some people where going, that's our guide we need to go over there. No you don't, listen to JZ he's explaining what we need to do. By this point I was starting to get a bit over the whole 'bus trip' thing. People are so selfish and ignorant sometimes.
Anyway, we all managed to get to Hans and our next bus and head off to our hotel. Unfortunately as we were heading out of the station and through the boom gate the driver turned slightly too early and the back of the bus hit the gate with a very loud bang. Oopsie. A window broke, luckily no one was hurt, so we had to stay there for about 30 mins while the police attended and things were worked out.
The driver has to go to the police station tomorrow to sort out a few things which means they need to rearrange the buses, there are three tours together now, as we'll be a bus short for a couple of hours.
We finally made it to our hotel, had a quick freshen up and headed out for dinner. Going out for dinner basically meant us walking around and looking for roads that looked lit up and busy or a shopping centre. We found a noodle place that had pictures :-) Another good choice.
We only have tonight in Suzhou, tomorrow we head for Hangzhou. This trip is by our coach.
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