On our own - Traveling While Brown

It’s a momentous day. Today, Cindy and I are officially alone on our trip. The previous 19 days were spent with family. The next 300 will be spent independently. We said goodbye to my Xiao Yi and Jiu Jiu in the morning and headed to our train in excitement. Our first stop is Pingyao. It’s an old merchant city that has remarkably preserved its traditional architecture. The city walls are in tact and enclose a lovely city center that’s an architectural marvel.

Instead of taking the slow direct train from Tangshan, we opted to take a slow first leg from Tangshan to Beijing and then a high-speed train from Beijing to Pingyao. It cut our travel time in half and saved us from having to spend a night on a train. I remember when the thought of that used to be extremely fun. That’s when I was young and stupid. Now I’m just stupid.

The only part about high-speed trains that the Chinese forgot to plan is labeling the seats on the outside of train cars. Like, we know we’re in car six. But neither we nor anyone else know where our seat is in car six, and both ends of car six have a door. That means it’s inevitable that people board the train car only to walk all the way to the other end with their bags in tow. And when someone else inevitably has to do the same thing in the opposite direction, you get Cindy stuck in the middle swearing in Spanish.

We arrived at Pingyao in the evening. We had scheduled a pick up from the train station and our driver was expecting two foreigners. The sight of me with Cindy was highly confusing. After greeting him in Chinese, he remarked, “You can sing.” Yes damnit, this bird can sing! Expecting two foreigners, he had made an entire van full of people wait patiently for our train to arrive. He didn’t want to strand two people who couldn’t speak Chinese at the train station. In a twist of fate, inside the van were two foreigners who couldn’t speak Chinese. They were rather upset that they had to wait to pick up two people who were perfectly capable of finding their way around.

Pingyao is as advertised. Even our hostel was located in a 300 year old courtyard house. Cindy thought it was the “cutest little thing.” Having arrived late, we grabbed some street snacks, had a beer in our courtyard, and called it night.