Day 6- Recuperation, then a train to Xi'an

Today we actually slept in late; we didn’t have to wake up until 7:30am. Breakfast started at 8:30am and we had a debriefing about the last day’s events. It was just a discussion about our flaws and how we can improve as a group to improve those flaws. We gained much encouragement for the next presentations we have to give. After the debriefing, the students packed their belongings and played sand volleyball, while some adults talked with a Chinese teacher.

We enjoyed our short free time while we had it to recuperate from the week’s activities. Then it was time to say good-bye to Jeanie our Qinhuangdao tour guide. We presented her with a gift and departed for a 4 hour bus ride back to Beijing. It was a long, eventless bus ride. It was just us, our tour guide Bruce, and our Master driver. There was so much traffic that we couldn’t believe it.

Once we finally arrived in Beijing, we had an American dinner at KFC. It was really good and it was great to have something besides traditional Chinese food for at least 1 meal. I’m not saying that traditional Chinese food is bad, but it felt really good to have the Colonel’s secret recipe slam my taste buds for a change. After we left KFC, Master TG (our driver) took us to the rail road station in central Beijing. There we departed from our bus driver of a week, Master TG. He was awesome because once you can drive in Beijing you can drive anywhere because the traffic is so bad. Anyway, we gave Master TG a gift and we headed to the busy train station.

When we finally made it through the train station security, we were sent to a remote section of a waiting room by a Chinese official for some odd reason… or if you have been following us on this trip, because of the H1N1 virus scare. Without the seclusion getting in our way we boarded the overnight train to Xi’an (pronounced She-on). We each had our own bed on the train and it was a really awesome experience although those beds were really small and stiff.