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Thursday : cloudy
Woke up pretty tired today, starting to have late nights and early mornings again. I also had a bad case of the sniffles.
We had a good but quick breakfast at the hostel then checked out and made our way to the airport on the metro.
The overnight rain did wonders for Beijing. The pollution has basically gone, we could see so much more of the cities skyline.
We got to the station around 7:30, we wanted to get there early to beat the morning rush with our packs. It was very easy to get to the airport on three trains. the trip took around one hour for under $5 so easy again.
It wasn't as easy to get plane tickets though. We tried a number of ticket offices once we arrived and the earliest available flight was for 5 or 6pm. We were kind of bumed out about a 10hr wait, especially when we opted for the plane over the train. We tried one more ticket office and the lady said that see would try and squeeze us onto an earlier flight. She asked us to take a seat and she would get back to us within halfa. So I went and got two giant coffees, and then waited for hopefully good news.
It was thankfully. She got us tickets for a 1pm flight. I know we should of bought tickets previously, but we tried finding a local flight agent but we had no luck. Out on the streets every shop seems the same over here. We checked the flights and from 10:00am onwards there was one flight every hour to Xian. We thought that it wouldn't be a problem getting a ticket for one of those flights at the airport.
Well we got our tickets, but we had to go checkin at another terminal. They run free bus services between each of the three terminals, which is nice.
We hoped off at terminal two checked in our luggage, then we thought we should buy our tickets to Kathmandu for the 15th now, seeing how there is only one plane per day EX Chengdu and no plane from Xian. No problems with buying those tickets except for the hole in our pockets, they were expensive flights.
We then had an hour or so before we needed to board so we hung out in a tea house and relaxed till it was time to board. We tried making a call to the hostel we wanted to stay at in Xian. We couldn't figure out the problem with our card that we bought back in Guilin. I looked for some help, and got it at a phone shop, but the girl said the card has no money on it. Great we bought a $5 card with no money in it, how did we manage to fall for that.
Anyway that wasn't the only problem we got delayed on the runway for almost an hour, the plane seemed like it just kept doing laps of the runway following other planes, there was a huge queue of planes waiting to take off.
Everything went smoothly once in the air though, the food was a bit rough though. Down on the ground we had no problems getting a lift into town by the local bus. Over an hour trip though the traffic is terrible in this town, we later found out there isn't a subway here yet.
Once off the bus we dodged all the scamming taxi's and found out what lane we needed to be in to get to the hostel.
It took about 30min walk to the hostel cool looking place too. It has a menu similar to the previous hostel, except it has an elevator even a roof top terrace that is a very cool place to relax. With ping pong and putt putt up there.
After our checkin It was difficult to find some food other than fast food. This town was full of take away shops, we walked for an hour before we found a place that looked decent.
The restaurant was very decent including the price, perfect spice in each dish tonight. We headed back to the hotel, then hung out up on the roof and I used the wifi and sent off some emails before bed.
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