day 5 - leaving Beijing - 21.08

Last night we packed till very late and also sat behind the computer posting/e-mailing and loading pictures up. I was sitting right under the air conditioner, i even felt the cool air on my back at some point. Well, once I got to bed at around 3am I was freezing and my throat was aching :( Long cold shrills followed :( After some shaking under the covers I put on my woolen socks hoping that the shrills will go away, but no use :( Finally at around 5am I ended up taking maximum amount of Citrosept drops and that helped luckily. So I had caught a cold :(( In the morning we were suppose to leave hotel at 8am to do the check-out, take our big bags to the train station and head over to the volleyball game. Once the alarm went off at 7am I had gotten about 1 hour of sleep and was still feeling very weak. It was raining outside and had been raining for a while as there were huge puddles on the street. Drank one Theraflu as well hoping to get better as soon as possible as we have a long train trip this evening. I was definitely not going anywhere as I did not feel good and perhaps the volleyball game got even canceled because of the rain, dunno. But in any case we slept in. Riina went and got some fruits and juice for me later on. After eating i started to feel a bit better as well.

Negotiated with the hotel reception lady and got to do the check-out at 2pm instead of noon. Got instructions to get to Beijing South Railway Station and headed off. Getting to the station ended up being a bit more complicated than "take bus #53 for 10 stations" as we were instructed, but all the people are so helpful and nice. Nobody speaks English, but once you got a map with Chinese locations and names you just point at it and they give you further instructions. Of course the instructions come in the form of a long story in Chinese :), but pointing helps. Works like a charm.

We had many hours to kill at the train station, luckily we found electricity plug so i prepared all the entries and am now posting them from the hotel in Qingdao. Train trip was quite fine, the train was a bit smelly, but that disturbed us only for the first 15 minutes or so. I got some good sleep in during the 6h ride. Train went mostly 160km/h and the ride was very smooth.