Ed:
Having spent a few more hours playing `shithead', a highly provocative card game in which the aim of the game is to beat your apponent by calling them `shithead', we got on our sweaty train that went to Zhengzhou. The journey started at 1830 and lasted 11.5 hrs, which would have meant that our self-enforced sleep deprevation would have given us many many hour of sleepy sleepy on train. Jo had a great sleep, but I stayed up most of the night worrying about imminent laduzi (translation: funny western poo trouble) caused by the restaurant car's `supper'. Jo and I had been ripped off earlier when we had sat down to a prison style tray of meat and rice that cost a fiver for both of us, and I was expecting serious bowel ramifications for such frivalous enjoyment of local food.

After catching two hours of sleep, we arrived at our intermediate destination of Zhengzhou in a foul mood; Jo was half asleep and I was trying to work out what Chinese for "do you have a cork" was. The train to Kaifeng was another two hours wait, so we plumped for the local roller coaster bus trip. The journey by mini bus was extremely exciting, in that the driver insisted on using both sides of the road with equal speed, and would not be happy unless he overtook anything that he saw. This meant that we did about 70km/h while everything else was puttering along at 35km/h. This did my laduzi a world of good.

Kaifeng bus station, like many bus stations, is not the nicest place to arrive in town. Having experinced the four lane rickshaw/taxi/beggar madness that sits around both Taiyuan and Zhengazhou, it was no suprise that the official bus station was another dusty courtyard full of knackered looking locals who had enjoyed a similarly confortable and relaxing journey as ours, just without the seats.

A quick taxi journey to the three star tiptop hotel (expensive at about 16 quid a night for the two of us) took us through a really compact town. Like Pingyao, this place has a big wall around it, but is a 3km sided square rather than the Pingyao-village 1.5km. However, a significant proportion of this extra size is given over to a) lakes b) parks c) temples d) food shops, all elements to make for a happier tourist area. Indeed, the Rough Guide is quite correct in noting that the PSB (achtung! police!) are more realaxed about laowai and general tourism, and accordingly we shall stay for 3 nights.

The hotel is a carbon copy of all other CITS (tourist board) approved ones, which means the same old light fixtures can be used again as our washing line facilities, and the new hotel complex is in an ancient courtyard thing, so it is quiet and pretty and nice. The best thing is the large quantity of night food stalls that dot all the streets around the lake. Jo and I really tried hard to do a sort of "try this here, try that there" policy on visiting the local food stalls, but it turned out to be a "try this here, sit down here and recover from over-eating", and a thoroughly enjoyable one at that too. We had a bowl of dumpling soup, which involved little meat, spring onion and garlic dumplings floating around in the delicious stock of boiled chicken carcasses. Looks awful in the pot, but it tastes delicious.

More about Kaifeng soon...

Ed:
Kaifeng was so nice, that we stayed for several days. Three in fact. Our last day typified the stay quite nicely. We got up at about 1000hrs, went out of our overnightly airconned room into humid heat, a bit like walking into a wall, and did things for the day, then eat food at night, then slept.

Morning food for the example day in question went as follows. Stumbled over to Dicos, the chinese non-Beijing fast food joint, for a quick reminder of what air conditioning was, and an icecream with chocolate sauce. It took about 5 minutes to walk over to the restaurant, but it took us through several little side streets and markets where they sell quite simply the most marvelous shite clothing and bags and stuff, along with a wheely-fridge and sun brolly every 2 yards to supply one's ever-growing cerrlerr (or cola) needs. The market which is near Dicos is v. similar, and has a limited selection of rather generic stalls. There is the generic stationary stall (stationery shurely -jo), the generic tupperware stall, the generic khaki trousers stall, the generic shit chinese music tapes stall, the generic silly little girly dress stall and other generic things. There was also a generic stall, where I presume all these generics come from. That was next to the stall stall (have you gone mad? -ed).

Dicos is nice and cool, and sells nice cool ice-cream. This served well for the next bit of breakfast, which was at the generic muslim 3rd degree burns stall. This stall is v. hot, and sells deepfried dough balls containing liquid sugar. Mmmmm, nice and hot, and great for numbing one's mouth for the nightly attack of the chilli sauce. More about that later.

Today's generic activity was `going to the park' (stop saying generic -jo). The park is a complex of reclaimed lands in one of the lakes in the middle of town. It has a generic garden island (you're fired -jo) which is disturbingly low in the water, and while it looks green and lucious from the shore-line, it soon becomes a scrubby heap of earth, which in all fairness is all it pretends to be. I think we both had a touch of `scrub blindness' that day.

The park has a temple in it, but it looked like it had at least 68 steps to the top of the Ziggurat, so most of the afternoon was spent lying around a little pagoda that sat in the near centre of the lake, with `excellent views of the surrounding area'. It had some excellent views of the surrounding microwave relay towers as well, and I siezed this oppurtunity to explain to Jo that if the tower was h meters tall, then one has to go (2[r0]h)^0.5 kilometres away before it disappears. Jo was impressed (no I wasn't -jo), until I quoted the earth as having a radius similar to Jupiter, and that the tower is visible from Helsinki type distances. But I managed to do some neat algebra, and I know that girls just love algebra.

We climbed the Ziggurat. It was nothing special, apart from the ancient designs and pagoda at the top and website type clouds painted around the top (click on the red star next to China Trip 2000 for details). There was a nice atmosphere up there though, with we westerners admiring the view and playing `shithead' while a chinese grandfather forced his grandson to say hello to us: so much so that the child wet itself. From the stains on the monuments in China, this is a local custom. `Westerner micturation challenge', must try that when we see the chinese people in Cantab.

Generic (outside now! -jo) evening food activity was a trip to the night food market. The previous nights bowl of dumplings was marred a bit by Joanna saying "oh you lucky thing, you've got shrimps in yours". Six eyed shrimps that looked unnervingly like the ones found in the pond at home, nasty little half inchers that look like they thrive on sewage. However, we got off to a good start by finding a pan cooked bread stall (still hot, v. good) and Jo managed to convince the g****ic egg stall woman to fry us a couple thus making the traditional chinese `Egg Fried Sandwich' dish. Mmmmm, got any brown sauce? Then we had a bowl of shrimp free dumplings (I convinced myself that these shrimps were in the local water supply, so it was nice to note their absence) with chilli sauce. Unfortunatly, our mouths had since recovered from the breakfast, and not being freshly cauterised, it hurt a bit. God knows what Sichuan food is, or rather will be like. Primed for more chilli action, we made a trip to the lamb kebab stick stall, and filled some bread with spicy lamb meat. Then did that one again because it was nice, and then watched Jo eat some meat jelly with flowers. I mentioned that it looked a bit like...

Jo:
Hairgel. It did taste lovely though, even with Ed spluttering in the background. We came to the conclusion that the whole night market is run by the state tourist association (CITS) - the whole picturesque and lively combination seeming altogether too unlikely to have happened naturally. The whole of Kaifeng put on their nicest clothes and wander around the centre of town eating and chatting, a top way to spend the evening really.

Leaving Kaifeng was not quite such a lovely thing. I refer back to the Beijing entry where we got to the train station, saw about a million people all queueing for our train etc. and to my explaining to Ed that we may have to do this (get a train without having a seat) at some point. Our time had come (cue echo and sinister laughter in the background).

The rain has stopped now, we go bye-bye yes?
p.s. not long until my birthday :)