Travels

Whew, I've been lazy. I apologize.

Since the lantern festival... A couple friends and I have been trying to travel every other weekend which has mostly worked...

Tianjin: February 13-14
the port city of Beijing about a 2 hour train ride east of Beijing on the slow, stuffy, crowed train. People alson really don't obey no smoking rules... if there's anything to convince me not to smoke it's probably these enclosed vehicles in which people light up one after another. That train ride was 6yuan though, about 95 cents. What a bargain. We really wanted to try the super fast train on the way back though so we splurged - I think it was about 50 yuan - 8 ish dollars. Whoa, that one was super comfortable but only 30 minutes. It could have lasted longer.
So when we got to Tianjin we hoped on a bus we thought would take us to our hostel. Two hours three buses later we arrived at the hostel (I believe we drove around it maybe 3 or 4 times). Unfortunatley nothing was open though as the bus rides took so long so we just hit the sack.
On Saturday we got up bright and early and went to the drum tower in the middle of the older part of the city. Nothing was open so it wasn't super interesting but I kind of liked it... it was really peaceful. After that we headed over to a little monestary which was also realy nice, although not my favorite monestary we've been to. In the afternoon we went to walk around a part of the city with a lot of European architecture (banks) from when China was semi-colonized (early 20th century). That was really interesting though. I felt like we could have been anywhere but China. The last thing we really did that day was to go to an outdoor market. I was skeptical but it actually turned out to be really fun. We had some pudding like snack made from flavored powder, hot water and driend fruits and watched 糖化 (tang hua) sugar painting. It's incredible. These men (generally men) sit at a piece of steel or something and use melted sugar or some sort to make incredible pictures. Then they stick a astick in it and voila! It's a lollipop. Although probably the prettiest lolipop I've ever seen. It was valentines day too so They also made roses out of red sugar.
After that we caught our super luxery train home.