I woke up at 4 AM mores’ the pity so I snuck out to the daybed and snuggled under the duvet there and read so I didn’t wake hubby. Just before 7 AM I snuck out of the room and went to the breakfast rooms. There was toast, sweet and sour chicken, two kinds of dumplings, coffee, tea, cereals, boiled eggs and fruits etc. IT was lovely. I ate, read and chatted with some French and Dutch people.

When I went back to the room I admired the lovely courtyard and chirping birdies and than went into the room to find hubby finally waking up. He slowly got dressed and I went to the breakfast room with him to keep him company. After eating hubby played with the computer and I read for awhile.

We finally worked up our courage to go exploring to get our train tickets. We walked the wrong way initially but finally found the Dongsi station and got our Yikatong Subway cards and took the train 3 stops, changed trains and 1 more stop to the Beijing Railway Station which looked massive.

Lines went quite fast in the ticket office part of the station and with no charge we had all four sets of train tickets.

We than tried to catch a taxi but the first driver seemed mad when we showed her in Chinese where we wanted to go and a guy got us to get out and took us to another cab where he tried to get us to pay him before we had gone anywhere so we got out and shoved our way back through the taxi line and took the subway back to the hotel.

When we got back we lied around while hubby worked and I read until we were hungry around 4 PM and than on advice of the front desk walked to the next hutong (Lishi) had a ton of little whole in the wall restaurants. We peeked in a few inclosing a tasty smelling Donkey Meat place and than found another that smelled extremely good.

We ordered pork dumplings (jia zxiao) and BBQ chicken on skewers. The brother the dumplings came in was spicy goodness with wonderful bits of cilantro and chilies. So hot in temperature and a bit hot in spiciness but it was superb. Hubby found the broth a bit spicy and didn’t like the chicken but thought the dumplings were good. I drank my huge beer and munched to contentment – Tai How La.

Afterwards we wandered back to the hotel and while hubby played with the computer some more I got ready for bed. We were both asleep around 7 PM which probably means an early morning tomorrow.