A tale of several cities

Greetings! Apologies again for the delay but we've had a grand time of things of late. Seeing as there wasn't a direct ticket from Yantai to Xi'an (where we wanted to go), we ended up going via two rather mediocre cities, Ji'nan and Zhengzou. Won't bore you all completely with the details. Ji'nan, which was 8 hours from Yantai on a hard seat train (this is not a pleasant experience, and for part of the journey we didn't have a seat) was ok. We arrived late and decided to go shopping as our clothes were all filthy and we had nowhere to wash them, plus there's a traveller's saying (check us out with the lingo) that in China it's cheaper to buy new clothes than to wash them. Apparently the people of Ji'nan haven't heard this saying and the Silver Plaza Shopping Centre had the most expensive clothes ever, more expensive than back home, but the cool brands were the ones that you'd normally find in pound stretcher, the really odd thing is that sports clothes like Addidas are really expensive but we thought they were all made here? You'd think the people would get some benefit from being used as cheap labour, but no. Anyhow, the next day (Tuesday 15th) we got up early and went to the Thousand Buddha Park. The park itself was really nice, with great statues dotted around the place of Buddhas in various poses, some, like picking ear or laughing, were great while others were more your stereotypical "Happy Buddha." We digress, the only reason we came here was that we'd read in the Lonely Planet (how we couldn't survive without that book) that there was a 'fun summer slide,' and they didn't disappoint! After catching a chair lift to the top, which was scary even though you were only about 10 feet from the ground, we caught the toboggan down, which was really cool.

01 The Famous Boiling Pot!

After this we got on the train to Zhengzou. Now this was great fun. The train was amazingly packed. People were sitting on the backs of chairs, people were sleeping under chairs (we loved the fact that the people selling ice creams didn't forget them) and generally it was rammed. You couldn't really go to the toilet or eat or even move, so after nine hours we were at breaking point! One highlight of the train journeys so far has to be the sock sellers, people that come on board and do a big sales pitch for socks, which includes pulling them, poking them with chopsticks and rubbing them with a wire brush, all the things you expect a good pair of socks to cope with! We go to Zhengzou about 12 and negotiated a good deal on a room (six pounds for the night) we crashed out. We had a quick peek at the city, seemed the same as the others, so weren't too bummed that our train was in the morning. The journey was amazing, mainly thanks to the incredible soft-seated-air-conditioned-double-decker-carriage-of-wonder (the official title) and 7 glorious hours later we finally arrived in Xi'an!!

02 1000 Budda Park

03 The cable car up....

04 The Toboggan down.....

Lazy Budda

The Golden Budda