Staying, Eating, Drinking

For the first part of our spring break trip, we decided to go to a small historical walled city named Pingyao. There is no airport there because it is so small and all the train tickets were sold out for New Years travel, so we ended up flying to a near by city named Taiyuan, about an hour and a half away. Thinking that we wanted to have as much of Sunday as possible to get to Pingyao, we booked an 8 am flight, forgetting that that meant we would have to get up at 5am to get to the airport. Needless to say, we arrived at the airport far too early but far too tired to care. Through research online, we found out that we could take a bus from Taiyuan to Pingyao, so after our flight we got a cab to the bus station and bought ourselves bus tickets. Thanks to a very nice Chinese lady who worked at the bus station, we got on the right bus (there were at least 50 in the parking lot, so we would never have found it) and headed for Pingyao. The ride took close to 2 hours, and as we got closer the bus driver started stopping on random street corners to let people off. At one corner, he pointed to us and then motioned for us to get off, saying "Pingyao!" over and over again. Obviously there's only one place that foreigners like us would be going, so we trusted the man and got off. We then hopped into a little golf-cart type thing that took us into the city and walked us to our hostel. The city was almost exactly what it looked like online, about 1km square and completely surrounded by a wall. It was mostly a residential area but with a couple of more "touristy" streets, although the whole place was a lot more of a backpacker's stop over than a tourist attraction, which we liked. We were basically the only non-Chinese people there, so we drew attention from the moment we arrived.

Our hostel was very nice and authentic, run by a Chinese family that spoke perfect English. Mom and Dad ran the hostel, the daughter ran a store 2 buildings down and the son ran the bar a couple of buildings down from there. They were very friendly and our room was very nice. Once we got there and dropped our stuff off, it was around 1pm, so we decided to go out and look around. The city was full of different historical sites that you could go into, basically old houses that had been made into museums. They were all very cool buildings, but the content got a little bit repetitive after 20 or so of them. Luckily, we had found out online that you could buy a 3 day pass and get into all of them for a decent price, so we did that instead of paying for each one separately.

We were in Pingyao for 3 days total, so we ended up seeing basically the whole city multiple times, once from up on top of the wall. It was a very small town to be in for 3 days, but we had fun and got to relax for a while. One of my favorite parts was that there were a lot of kids that came up to us to practice their English. We had one little girl come running up to us all excited to ask us where we were from, what our names were and how we liked Pingyao. Once we answered all of her questions, she thanked us and skipped away very excited. This happened again with a little boy doing a homework assignment and two college age kids that were also doing an assignment. We were happy to help and take pictures of them, though unfortunately we didn't get any copies of the pictures. On the last day, four different tour groups doing a scavenger hunt all crowded around us trying to get pictures and our signatures since one of their things to find was foreigners and we were pretty hard to miss. It was actually very fun and the attention we got was all very positive.

On the last day, while we waited to head back to Taiyuan, we decided to get massages from one of the many shops on the streets. We payed $8 for 45 minutes and it was a great deal. The Chinese women were small but mighty and massaged our backs and necks and then did some sort of pressure point thing on our backs which was cool. I only laughed once which was a huge accomplishment for me, so Joe was pretty proud. At around 4, our hostel manager arranged a car to pick us up and take us to the airport so we wouldn't have to take the bus again. Once we got to the airport, we found out that our flight was delayed around 2 hours, so we ended up spending about 5 hours in the airport waiting for our flight until 10pm, making it a very long day.

A sign we saw on the main road in the town

This is who we were greeted by inside our hostel.

The courtyard of our hostel.

The gate right outside our hostel on the main road.

Whoever printed this sign made a ton of money, because it was in the window of every hostel and hotel in the city, and there was at least 20.

Someone's doorway into their house/garden area.

One of the many museums we went to.

Picture demonstrations on the wall of the kungfu museum.

Weapons in the museum.

Whoever made these mannequins also made a lot of money because they are everywhere in Chinese museums.

Me in a round doorway.

Courtyard of one of the museums.

Too short to ring the bell, don't know how Chinese people do it.

The gate in the middle of the city. About 8 other people took a picture of me while Joe walked to his spot.

Climbing to the top of the wall.

View from the top.

It looked like an old castle.

Us on top of the wall.

Joe's too tall to be a watchman in Pingyao.

Playing with statues on the wall.

This guy's arms were in perfect hug position.

On the second day, it snowed.. this is the view of the snowy city.

Cool entrance to one of the temples.

He liked this statue's leg guards with faces.

One of the temples we went to had some angry looking statues.

City wall at night all decked out for New Years. There was a carnival right outside the city wall one night.

The flags and decorations in the bar of our hostel. Everyone had written messages on the walls, so we wrote one too. 

Some of the "local specialties" that every restaurant served. We tried some cat-ear-like noodles and some fried dumplings, but nothing else looked very appetizing.

The cheap massage place we went to on the last day. 

Overall, Pingyao was a lot of fun and very different from anywhere around Shanghai that we had been to before. We would definitely recommend it to anyone on our trip or future trips for a short weekend visit.