Our day on Thursday started early as we needed to make it on time for our bus all the way across town - about 2 hours by bus. But after 4 buses passed us without stopping because they were full well before they got to our stop (when we say full, we mean sardine-tin with people hanging out the door!), we had to resort to catching a taxi. This meant we got to the station more than an hour early, so after getting our tickets we sat down to observe the chaos around us.
We eventually boarded our bus, which would drop us off in Taiyuan 8 hours later. As soon as we arrived we bought our tickets back to Jinan for Sunday, to ensure we actually got home in time to teach on Monday! With little to do in Taiyuan we headed straight for the train station to try for a train to Pingyao that night - and were successful, the only down side being that it didn't leave until 11.20pm, four hours later.
So we headed to a nearby restaurant with a couple of French teachers we met on the bus to count the hours down.
We finally arrived in Pingyao just after 1am in the morning and headed straight to our accommodation and bed.
On Friday we spent the day wandering around Pingyao Old Town. Pingyao is one of the most famous Old Towns in China, and is home to the first Chinese bank. Because the town fell into poverty in the 20th century, there was no money to modernise, subsequently creating a zone of the past for tourists to visit.
Although we enjoyed the old town and the many museums, temples and government offices (including the first bank and old prisons), we found it much more enjoyable to lose ourselves along the back alleyways of the town. 
Once off the main roads you find the 'real' old town, with children playing, grandmas and grandpas just sitting back enjoying life and not trying to hawk souvenirs to all passing tourists - actually they looked a little surprised that we were not on the main tourists roads! 
On Saturday we headed outside of the city walls to Shuanglin Temple - a Buddhist temple purportedly one of the most famous in Shanxi Province, with exquisite carvings throughout the temple. Some of the broken carvings revealed the secret to their production, with a wood skeleton and clay-like mud to create the shape and give detail, before painting to finish. One of the down points of visiting this temple was that due to the fact that Shanxi is the centre of coal production all the statues were covered in coal dust, and robbed them of their colours and details.After visiting the temple we wandered around the village that seemed basically asleep, before heading back to our hotel to shelter from the rain. The afternoon was spent adlibing our way around some more alleyways, spending most of it lost but thoroughly enjoying the feeling - although we always had the wall to keep us from wandering too far astray. The wall was cool to see, especially in the parts of town where it hadn't been renovated because it was just mud - none of the new 'old' bricks in sight. We also popped up onto the wall for a view over the city. A highlight of the day was entering a Taoist Temple at the end of the day and almost having it entirely to ourselves - a nice contrast from the previous day when we struggled to even move in the crowds.
That night we really treated ourselves: first we got a full body Chinese massage, before indulging in our first Western Meal since Vietnam, which was definitely worth the high price!On Sunday morning we began the mammoth trip in reverse and arrived back in Jinan in time for dinner! The only hitch was getting caught in major traffic jams that added in 2 hours to our travelling time, and resulted in the bus being turned off along with the air-con.
It was an awesome trip into the past, and possibly the last time we'll have a home to return to for the next year!
Adlibing the old alleys.
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