Everybody knows morning butt and evening butt are two completely different butts!

We awoke nice and early this morning. We were NOT going to miss our train to Beijing!
First order of business? A quick trip to Cafe 85 for one last fix of maple bread and mango smoothies.
We got a couple of sugar twisty breads for the road and booked it over to the bank to take out enough RMB for the next leg of our journey.
We were tight on time so we quickly went back to the hostel, grabbed our bags, dropped off our key and ran off into the ... wait, how do we get to the metro station that gets us to the train station? We thought we knew. A guy from the hostel who spoke broken english told us to walk left out of the hostel 500 meters and then we'd find the line 3. We walked five hundred meters (or more!) only to find the street split into two and we didn't know which way to go. Also, it was a cobblestone street that did not look like a main road at ALL.
Went BACK to the hostel not knowing what time it was. (naturally I was freaking out) and asked the guy again. He said "Walk five hundred meters and I gaurantee you will see it."
A couple kilometers and roads and asking strangers later, there it was: the Number 3! WHAT A RELIEF!
Once we got off the number three, getting to the train station was another adventure. But we got there.
We thought maybe we should buy some water in the train station, but the price was rediculous (6RMB... Equivalent to less than a dollar CDN) but here in China, that's highway robbery! We thought we were being sooo smart and that they'd give us water on our 10 hour train ride.
The train station was PACKED FULL of people. It was the most crowded place in China I've seen yet.
When we got on the train there was a lady sitting in my window seat. You think I let her get away with it? NO WAY! I pointed at the seat number about 5 times at her and she kept shrugging (she was one of THOSEEE people) and finally the guy behind us told her to get her butt out of my seat (at least I imagine that's what he said... it was in Mandarin).
The train ride was long and there was no food or drinks served. We had to end up buying water for FOURTEEN RMB! The lady beside us was laughing in disbelief. We figured that it would be like someone buying a 500 ml bottle of water in Canada for 8 bucks. Oops. We didn't plan very well for that one.
The ride was long, but surprisingly tolerable considering we had no form of entertainment except a new card game that we played only once. (Courts of Medici) and the view out the window of the countryside and the shantytowns and the mounds of garbage.
When we got to Beijing we went on the wrong subway and got off at the wrong stop and asked for directions and these 2 nice people tried to figure it out on their GPS FOREVER and then they told us we wanted the line 2 not the line 4. Oops.
We were almost there, though and our spirits were high!
It was pitch black and getting late by the time we arrived near our destination. We walked and walked and walked and walked and it was SCARRY! Lots of drunk people, some cops, and the further we walked, the sketchier things looked.
A girl stopped us and asked if she could help us. She told us where to go (and she was right!) down this cool market street that was not at all scarry, but then into an alley that was scarry and pitch black.
We walked down it for a bit and then we saw a hostel. I told Stu that I wanted to go in and ask for directions to our hostel but then we found out that it WAS our hostel but it had a different name than it did on the hostel world website. (Well they should have TOLD us that!) It was a miracle that we stopped in there at all.
Our room is spacious but one hilarious and weird and grossish thing is that the bathroom is also the shower.... like, the shower is right there by the toilet.
It's bizarre. We'll take a picture and post it later.
That's all for now.
ps stu just walked in wearing a muscle shirt.