After passing up on this feast, we continued walking down the street. Ashley spotted a tea house and suggested we go in for a spot of tea. First mistake of the night. No one spoke English and there were 2 Chinese military guards at the door.
After some jumbled communication we sat down for what we thought was a sampling of teas. Second mistake.
48 glasses of tea in, 2 half eaten green tea cookies, and 1 tea flavored prune that Jon spit out on the table and they're still pouring the tea. Jon said, "You got us into this, you gotta get us out!" Ashley turns to the tea pourer and politely points to her wrist and says, "Train leaving. Need to leave." Pourer smiles and gets more hot water for tea.
Jon begins laughing so hard he begins to cry and Ashley chokes on her 49th glass of tea.Finally after more charades and baby talk they get the idea and we pay $20 or so for about 2 bags of tea. It was worth the memories.
We walked back to the hotel (starving) had a beer and waited for Oodle to finally open. We were both high on Black Tea and could barely sit still. Ashley peed 14 times between 5:00 and 5:24 PM.
We ate our noodle soup in record time - 4.9 minutes and headed for the train station. Here's some photos from dinner:
Unlike our lovely experience on the train from Hong Kong to Beijing, we were greeted with a much different scene this time. The entire population of Georgia could fit in this train station and they were all 1.) staring at us with disgust 2.) waiting to get on our train and 3.) chewing and spitting sunflower seeds and other liquids directly onto the floor.
Needless to say, we weren't all that excited about this train ride.Overall, the train ride wasn't too bad to Shanghai once we got past the odor, the precariously mounted upper bunk and Jon's bird flu that he contracted when a sunflower seed went into his eye. We slept most of the train ride and survived again on GORP and Ritz crackers. (Thanks to Ashley again :-))
