Going down the mountain

1st November
This morning I woke up at 5.30am because the room was so cold!!! (altho i had been woken up a couple of times during the night by someone ringing my english phone to confirm my accupuncture appointment - after about the 3rd time of them calling me i answered and told them they had the wrong number and then hung up). at 6.50am we had our wake up call and i quickly got into the shower to try and get warm. We went down to breakfast and I had rice porridge which was pretty minging, but then they brought out some cake which was nice.

After breakfast we went to wait at reception for everyone to get ready, but for some reason it took ages and it was so cold sat there. Eventually we set off and we only had the annoying tourguide woman because the other guide had to go during the night. I was really pleased to be walking again because it made me feel less cold. We only walked for a couple of hours, but some of it was quite hard and we had to go up a lot of steps. Because we only had one guide we all had to go down on the cable car which was quite annoying because we had to pay 65yuan for it, and it was a nice day so i would have walked down if we'd had the choice.

When we got off the cable car we got on a bus down to the bottom of the mountain and then we got on our coach which took us to a restaurant nearby. We had such a nice lunch - there was the usual chinese stuff, but we got some really nice meatballs, and then we got chips!!!! yummy there was a bit of a fight over chips tho! We couldnt leave the restaurant through the door that we'd come in through - they made us walk out through the shop which sold ridiculously expensive carvings, jewels and pottery - did they actually think that a group of students would buy anything??

Afterwards we went to Hongcun village which was really pretty. It was a traditional village with lots of nice buildings, and some of crouching tiger, hidden dragon was filmed there. But it was really annoying because we had to follow the annoying tourguide the whole time and we didnt get chance to stop and look at anything because she kept say ing ZOU LA (keep walking). Although at one point we just ignored her and ended up losing everyone, but there was a guy from the uni there and he showed us where we had to go. I was carrying a flag that said shanghai normal university on it, and when we saw the tourguide woman again she waved her special tourguide flag at us, which i think was supposed to make us hurry up, but i just waved my flag back at her - she did not like that at all, ive never seen anyone look so angry. Altho, i think maybe she was slightly jealous of my flag because it was better than hers.

Anyway, after we were rushed around the village we got back on the bus and we went to the old street where we had been on my birthday. We couldnt be bothered to follow the annoying tourguide woman again so we asked if we could go to the bar where we'd been on my birthday, and the guy said that it was fine and that he would ring us when they would be going for tea. We got to the bar and had some yummy hot chocolates, and the guy who owned it remembered my name!! We were there for ages and the guy never called so frankie called sarah who said that they were sitting down at the restaurant about to eat, so we quickly left the bar and went to meet everyone. After tea we went to the hotel where we had stayed on the first night. We didnt do anything in the evening because we were all pretty tired from our mountain expedition, so we just went to the supermarket next door to stock up on chocolate.