Day 17- Nine Million Bicycles but only One Train Ticket

It would be fair to say that I was in a pretty bad mood for most of my time in Beijing. The wide sky that had made me feel so free in Mongolia was now hidden behind a thick blanket of suffocating smog, that I could practically taste as I let it poison my lungs. Buildings, walls, fences and security checks again dictated where I walked, and suddenly everybody was in a rush, beeping horns, pushing into subways, weaving around each other on bikes. It put me on edge.

When the Far East International Youth Hostel with its very English sounding name didn't have anybody that spoke English in it, I thought it was a stupid hostel already. When I found my room to have a hole in the ceiling, my opinion lowered. When they told me the washing machine was broken, I started getting angry. And when it transpired that they didn't have my train tickets for tomorrow...

I left the hostel, without any particular plan, but with a bag of dirty laundry, an anxiety that I was never going to escape Beijing, and an irrational fear of toilets. The third problem was solved easily enough- I went to a public toilet and found it far cleaner than any in the UK. After a while, I found a place to wash my clothes, and things were starting to brighten up when I bumped into a friend I had met in Ulaanbaatar. Over a big bowl of noodles, it turned out his train tickets were also nowhere to be found, so the final problem was at least now shared. With the noodles we had a beer, and I discovered the full extent to which I'd been ripped off the night before (the same brand of beer cost less than a tenth of what Ching and I paid). 

That evening, I walked to a big park, where the noise of the city was muffled, and replaced with the music of a traditional Chinese band. There were trees, and birds, and even the sky made an appearance. My soul must have been healed somewhat, as when I returned to the hostel, it didn't seem too bad after all. Apart from the fact, of course, that they still couldn't give me my train ticket, with hours left before I was supposed to leave for Vietnam.