| DAY TRIP TO CHENGDE (Part 1)
Posteado por Olaya García
Nota: Como nos consta que tenemos entradas al blog desde países angloparlantes (Un saludo especial para Canadá, Estados Unidos e Inglaterra), a partir de este momento colgaremos algún post en inglés. Los que no lo entiendan… se van a tener que conformar con mirar las fotos como tantas veces han hecho los que no entienden el castellano, lo siento, pero les debemos esto a los lectores de otros países.
Javier Rubio.
We were up at 5.30am and although sleepy, we were really excited about the day ahead. As every morning we did enjoy the Western style breakfast (buffet for 28RMB) with toasts, at least 5 different kinds of jam, croissants, saussages, mini-hamburgers, boiled, scrambled and fried eggs,  veggies, fruits, four different types of cereal, milk, coffee, rice, baozi and some potatos with curry. Mnn...perhaps you can find that in any other hotel in China but for us it tasted so good after all these weeks here.
At around 7am we reached the train station, which was quite crowded. I was keen in finding out what “hard seats” meant in China because our trip to Shanghai had been in soft seats and that had been more than fine. I was expecting the wooden seats I had tried in India, the few times I had the “luck” to travel in 3rd class yet instead, I was happily surprised to see that ours were a very soft version of hard (like Indian 2nd class) and similar to some you might still find in Spain.
 It took us four hours to reach Chengde and we tried to sleep through it, although we ended up just listening to the people and admiring the views, which reminded us of Castilla, in the centre of Spain, due to its dry scenery, the trees along the river (we called them ‘álamos’ in our country) and lots of maize fields. As Estela mentioned later, it is in the trains (actually, I think that in all public transport) that one can gather better how lay people really are and behave. It was really interesting for us to see how parents and grandparents played and communicated with their children, how uniformed train workers sold all sorts of souvenirs and how people did not stare at us so much and even offered us to share their food. I think the train was definitely one of the highlights of that day. 
Chengde is known as the Imperial Summer Villa and was purposedly built by the Emperors to escape from Beijing’s heat during the summer. The Summer Resort is a park, of nearly 590ha, that includes its own lake, pine forests, hunting ground and pavilions and nowadays its more of a day trip/picnic place for families, where people can take a one hour little train tour around the parkland.
Our time in the park was extremely relaxing, walking and smelling flowers and trees and listening to a band of traditional Chinese music players.   |
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