[ Daniela ] This morning after a later wake up (8:15am!!!), we headed down to breakfast at 8:45am where our second last breakfast of the trip would take place. After breakfast we waited in the lobby for a while before going down to the subway. At the subway we took one train with 6 stops straight to the Lama Temple, although it wasn’t actually straight there, as we ‘lost’ a student at the very first stop! Poor Ruby! (Don’t worry we found her). The doors closed on the train before she could get in! The emergency management plan worked perfectly as Ruby stayed put and our Chinese guide, Charles, returned to get her.
The Lama Temple was an amazing experience, especially the beautiful smells of rotting persimmons and strong incense. Apart from this, the gigantic Buddhas caught our eyes, especially the last one where we had to look up and break our necks to catch a glimpse of the head. Once we were done observing these, we were all excited to finally eat some lunch as most of us were hungry. We went to a Chinese fast food place where we chose between pork, beef and chicken with rice. I chose beef and it was a bad idea… I don’t know how everyone else felt about the food, but to me I would prefer to eat the air with my chopsticks! Then we took the many trains back to the hotel where we had a 20 minute break to prepare for all the money we would be losing, shopping at the Pearl Market. In this 20 minutes I realised that I had my suitcase locked and my keys to open it were missing…
Once we arrived, after a 20 minute walk, we got given 2 hours to shop. Whilst the girls were shopping for traditional, nice Chinese things, most boys decided to spend their money on more fake goods (the amount of watches they have now!). There was also the group of girls obsessed and spending most of their money on their dried mango from a Japanese store, Miniso where Mr Scott set the trend. I, on the other hand, decided to save most of my money for this big day. My best buy today was a silk, traditional, red Chinese dress which ended up being 320 RMB from 4000 RMB which is a crazy bargain!!! Angela helped me with the bargaining and I came out of the change room to see her sweating her head off after a solid 25 minutes of convincing, but the thing is, the lady was still in her 700’s! So we decided to do the ‘slow walk’ twice and eventually she screamed at us with the price we wanted. At the 5:00pm meeting time we all shared with each other what we had bought. We then walked back to the hotel and everyone got excited for the dinner ahead (McDonalds).
Jo and I entered our hotel room where we met our friend Barry (the ghost of Chongwenmen hotel). We had an eventful night yesterday. It started when Jo had finally reached the toilet after a very long bus ride, where she heard an EXTREMELY loud screaming of “MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” in her ear. I was right outside the bathroom door, banging, telling her to hurry up and I could hear minimal sound. As Jo and I talked about it afterwards, Jo quickly checked the time to see how long we had to get ready and the watch was reset to 8:10pm (it’s not a cheap China watch). It wasn’t even 5:05pm. Jo then said that we had to give this ghost a name and so ‘Barry’ appeared. We then agreed to leave the room and run to Rachel’s room to tell her all about our friend. We were then shouting our heads off only to be silenced, when we heard a ringing phone coming from our room at the end of the corridor (the creepy exit with no light). We suddenly looked at each other with worried emotions and our ghost story was rejected by Mr Scott who had heard our shouting! We were sent back to our room where Jo and I prayed that Barry was gone. We agreed to leave the room at 5:50pm in order to be downstairs at 6pm and you wouldn’t believe what time we heard a very light knocking on our door… and no one was there. As we were leaving the room, Jo took out her deodorant from her toiletries bag and said to Barry “if you are trying to say something, put the deodorant back in the bag”. We were relieved to come back to see the deodorant in the same spot as to where it had been placed before we left. Now, Barry is one of those friends you will never forget about and we will miss Barry when we head back home tomorrow.
Back to reality, when we walked back from the McDonalds we entered the room again. We were greeted by a staff member, who came with tools prepared to break my lock open, including a hammer and who knows what else! After 2 minutes he pops open the lock and guess what I find inside my suitcase… the keys!!!! But don’t worry I have a spare lock. After this Jo and I sat on our beds talking whilst munching on our many packets of dried mango, preparing for the final day tomorrow!
Note from Mr Scott: clearly, Barry doesn’t use deodorant…
