Day 6 : Tianjin and the dog don't care...

Bo: There are 32,000 in Tianjin
Rebecca: People?
Bo: No, taxis. There are 10,000,000 people in Tianjin.

This is small compared to the 67,000 taxis in Beijing. And we finally had a woman taxi driver with a lace curtain shading the driver's side window and long white gloves to protect her arms from the sun. Chinese women want to stay as white as possible.

Bo's friend Lei made a reservation for us at a Chinese hotel and conveniently forgot to tell them that we were foreigners. In China, there are hotels designated for foreigners. It made our stay much cheaper.

The hotel was located on Ancient Culture Street - a new "old" street with a new "old" Drum Tower at the end. The real Ancient Culture Street was destroyed in the name of urbanisation.

We grabbed a taxi to Food Street, a sort of in door mall with restaurants of all sort. But all we wanted were the special "Dog don't care" Baozis - special dumplings in Tianjin. Everything was closed until 5 pm so we waited in McDonalds and ate "mahua" - literally "snakes" but looked more like large, solid turds.

Once we ate our baozis - once again too many of them - we went to see Bo's art academy. We went to the academy's art supply store so Jerome could buy some ink, paper and brushes. He walked out very happy with his wolf and sheep fur brushes and ink stones.

While Rebecca was busy taking care of food-induced stomach cramps, Jerome and Bo took a trip to Carrefour. They came back an hour later with a fire dragon fruit - probably one of the most beautiful fruits we've seen so far (pictures to come!)

We spent the evening relaxing and getting reading for the next day's train journey to Datong.