Delayed

Today was the day I said goodbye to my apartment. It has been my home for the last two months, and I am actually a little bit sad about leaving this behind.
I had nice times there and spent lovely evenings behind my pc. Also it felt like the place where I belonged in Beijing. Where I came home to after work..

The thing I am going to miss most about this place are the food stands on the street in front of my apartment. The ones with the amazing food. The noodles, the pancake/omelets, the bing (pizza/taco) and all the foods on a stick. I am especially going to miss the people that were recognizing me and actually remembered what I want to eat. At the noodle stand they knew what kind of noodles I liked and that I don't want anything spicy with them. At another stand they actually remember that I was from Helan and they were telling this to other Chinese people.



So after this emotional goodbye of this nice place, I went to the subway station to rush to the university. Get money, get train tickets and meet up with Beth and Marlene to take a taxi towards the train station on the other side of the city. Or at least, this was our plan..
I am going to give you the spoiler that we did make it to the train station, but not actually ever on the train..

We were trying to get a cab near university, but this turned out to be impossible. We were a little bit startled by the fact that we could not get one, because there are always cabs near university. Luckily a teacher of Marlene walked by and helped us getting a cab. Or at least she tried. When she did not succeed, she offered us a ride. Or well, her husband would take us. We were so happy and feeling very lucky at that moment. But well,, the traffic was horrible! A ride of half an hour took us three! Needless to say, we were late and missed our train. Also, probably needless to say, I was freaking out in the car and hated the fact that we did not decide to take the subway.. The husband was very nice, and the other girls were more relaxed then I was.. Which helped, at least a little bit. We arrived at the train station half an hour after our train left. The husband was very helpful and walked inside with us to change our train ticket. We got one for tomorrow at 4 o'clock. The only thing is that we needed to upgrade our ticket, so we payed 300 yuan extra. Nonetheless, we were relieved that we still could go and start traveling at some point.

I need to say that at this point we were hungry, tired and just fed up with this day.

We decided to go and eat somewhere at the train station and then find a hotel nearby for the night. We all agreed that we do not want to travel that same road again tomorrow.
So we went to the big golden arches to get our favorite meal and some ice-cream. But with our luck of that day.. they were out of ice-cream. So we just had a good meal.
We walked to the hotel, which is 50m from the exit of the train station, to get a room there. But because of the upcoming holidays this Monday, they were out of rooms there.. We were lucky enough though that one of the receptionist could speak English. He tried calling different hotels in the neighborhood to see if they had rooms available. Too bad, the only rooms available were in hotels that were quite far away.
Eventually we decided to go back to the university. Marlene phoned her roommate and asked if it was ok if I would spent the night in their room. She thought it was no problem, so I finally had a place to spent the night.

We went back to university by taxi, which now was a very fast ride all of the sudden. We all were in desperate need of some fun I guess, so decided to watch Pocahontas in one of the lounges in the dorm.
We eventually went to bed around 1 o'clock. Or in my case, I went to lay down on my yoga mat with towels and a blanket over and under me. Marlene and I talked for an hour or so about our boys and stuff. It felt like a regular sleep over.

So all in all, it was a horrible day and a bad start for my traveling adventure.
But I guess my adventure is just a little bit delayed and it will all be fine.
(That is what I need to keep telling myself)