Having Water Boiled Meat at Chengde 承德
I was extremely frustrated at how that day turned out. I spent CNY 75 to get to the city of Chengde 承德 in Hebei 河北 province, only to arrive 4 hours late and no affordable place to stay. For some reason they don’t make it easy for foreigners to stay here. Maybe they only want the ones with money, but I don’t really see anything worth shopping here. After a few minutes trying to figure out what to do, I decided to go back to Beijing instead.
But first I would not go home empty handed. I was walking around one of their commercial centers looking for a place to eat. I don’t really know what is the specialty in Chengde so I just went for something familiar. A small eatery was still open, though I could not see inside. There were a lot of teenagers there hanging around and were very noisy. I guess that is part of the atmosphere. I ordered my water boiled meat 水煮肉 which turned out to be a huge bowl, however I had enough time to spare so I slowly ate the entire bowl. I wasn’t very tasty either as I’ve had much better ones elsewhere.
Strolling Along Chengde Bridge 承德大桥
I took a stroll along the Chengde Bridge and after taking a few photos, I hailed a cab to go back to the bus terminal. The taxi driver was very friendly noting that my accent gave me away as a foreigner. I told him my plight and offered to find me a place to stay. However, the place he was offering isn’t really much cheaper so I declined, explaining that it would still be cheaper for me to come back here some other day. The thing with taxis here is that you get to choose your price. Naturally I didn’t know how much it costs to get back to the bus station and handed him CNY 10.
The bus back to Beijing also costs CNY 75, I asked them if they would go by the expressway 高速, they replied that it would be “up to me”. Puzzled as to what they mean, I boarded the bus and the driver was asking who wants to go by expressway. Apparently, it is the passengers who pay the toll for the expressway, if there aren’t enough passengers, there won’t be enough people for the toll. Which is exactly what happened on my way here. However, there were enough people on the bus to pay for the toll. We were asked to fork out another CNY 15 for the toll, if not, we would have taken the orignal highway, which wasn’t that fast at all. True enough all of the passengers voted to go by the expressway and we were back in Beijing in an amazing two hours. I just wished that the first bus took this route, so I wouldn’t have not wasted a day going to Chengde.
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