Thursday 13 Nov 2014

Good sleep. Up at 7.15am. Got the runs again. Five times before midday.

Jan went off to Tien An Men Square / Forbidden City by himself, but in fact never made it, instead he tried to walk there and ended up lost, walking around the lakes instead. He was back at about 2pm, buggered. He had tried to take a taxi, but found it already had passengers and he couldn’t get the driver to understand what he wanted. So he walked 17Km (?) around the lakes, didn’t see Tien An Men/FC and was pretty fed up.

While he was out I rolled on my glasses on the bed and broke the frame. Emergency – can they send me to a place? A desk guy takes them and says he’ll ride his bike to a place where they will fix them. Later he says the glasses bloke will be back at 5pm. He came up to the room at about 6.30pm, all fixed, They looked as good as new, and when I asked about the cost, he said no charge!! How about that for service? I am mightily impressed.

Without my glasses, I walked to small shop nearby and found it’s OK.

Out to eat at 7pm and tried what turned out to be a real dump of a place just nearby. Food was peasant fare – pork balls, cabbage, vermicelli in a soup. Another bowl was noodles, tomato, mushroom. Near cold  All crap. Y26 Jan paid. There was a drunk guy at the next table who was out to it. They tried to lift him out but he wasn’t going. Cigarette smoke! Terrible. Marks all over the walls, nothing had been cleaned for centuries. Ugh.

Not a good day. We can’t wait to move on.