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We arrived in China on the 2nd February after a 5 hour flight from Kuala Lumpur. The airport was 180km away from Shanghai (the city we thought we were flying into) so we decided to have a couple of days in Hangzhou which turned out to be really good.
We found our hostel and then decided to go straight to the train station to book our onward journey to Xi-an. It was quite funny trying to get to the station as the taxis we flagged down couldn't understand a word we were saying and vice versa. There were a lot of hand gestures! Being in China has been quite a culture shock as noone can speak English and we can't speak any Chinese and we have no idea what any of the characters mean! We are getting along by getting English speaking people at the hostels to translate the English into Chinese for us. After sucessfully getting the train tickets with some help from the staff at the hostel we went back to the hostel for a chilled out evening. We had a lovely Chinese meal and played a few games of pool on the free table and watched a dvd before having a relatively early night.
The next morning we were up earlyish to go and have a walk around the lakes. They are quite a famous tourist attraction and we spent a few hours having a walk around. They were very beautiful and really worth a look. We got a lot of strange looks as we were walking around as many of the Chinese people are not used to seeing foreigners and therefore we are trying to get used to being stared at all the time, whether it is walking around the town, getting the train or eating dinner! We spent the evening in the hostel, again having a few games of pool and wathcing a dvd. A bit later on we had a game on the nintendo wii which was really good fun. Matt and I played Mario vs Sonic olympics and at the beginning I was absolutely useless but near to the end I got a world record in the 110m hurdles! I was like lightening!!
The next morning we were up early to go and get the train to Xi-an. We checked out of the hostel and got a taxi to the train station. We had a hard sleeper seat which meant that we had a bed in a cubicle, but it was set out like bunk beds but 3 instead of 2 and one set of 3 next to us so there was 6 beds in our little bit. The train journey went pretty quickly considering it was 19 hours, I slept for a lot of it! We did try to go and get some food from the dining car however all the menus were in Chinese and none of the staff spoke any English except 1 man who knew the word for beer so we had a beer before we went to sleep!!
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