Pingyao

What a grey place. But appealing grey. Noisy still though. Because when I arrived they'd just started digging up every single road in the city so they could repavethem in appealing grey slabs. Of course if it was in the UK, the area would be off limits, but I arrived in the town at 3am off the train, and the taxi driver got lost and couldn't drive through, so we stumbled along with only the light from his mobile phone to guide us through the mud and holes in the dug-up roads. I got a few hours sleep in the most luxurious hotel of my travels - heating and heating and MORE heating! Then got up to look round the old financial houses of the town. Its famous for inventing the first banks and cheques system in China. All the information (apart from the "no smoking" signs) is in Chinese, so I didn't learn much, apart from that the houses were very grand, with lots of small rooms and open courtyards, all easy to get lost in. The next day I took the guidebook's advice and hired a bicycle to ride the 7km to a temple out of town which had lots of pottery figures like at Xian. The guidebook didn't know of course that there were no roads as they'd all been dug up, and when I got out of the town centre, all the trucks moving all the mud and bricks and stone slabs etc were zooming up and down the road spraying dust in my face and beeping their horns. The guidebook also didn't know that I didn't have any gloves and that I was there in winter, so my fingers nearly froze off and my legs got all chapped and sore. Then when I arrived at the temple this annoying man asked me for 1 Yuan to park in the carpark (which is nothing, but it was the principle) so I told him no way and just parked my bike a few metres away. All the way through the temple I was then worrying that they'd steal my bike but it was ok. And then the spare battery ran out on my camera...