Leaving Xining :(

Sunday

So the time was finally upon us, it was packing/cleaning day. Luckily I was mostly packed so it didn't take too long for me. Was sad though, packing up my life for 5 months and throwing away  a LOT of stuff I had accumulated over my time here.

We packed up and headed to town to take pictures with Michael Li and sign our departure forms. We have money!!!

We finally finished packing and it was a rather sad sight!

We watched a movie for the last time in Alex's room and then headed to bed, Monday was going to be a long day!

Monday

OK so the Chinese turned up at about 8 with a minibus and a pickup truck! They planned ahead?! SHOCK HORROR! Fish, Vivian and Mr Qi were there and they joined us for a breakfast of bread, eggs and beef. We got them to try brown sauce, it did not go down well! They like baked beans though!

Mr Qi gave each of us a gigantic loaf of bread for the train, I already had a massive bag of snacks!

After breakfast we all bundled in the car and began the journey to the train station. Despite everything we were definitely going to miss Xining...

We got to the train station and said goodbye to Will and Deena, they were off to Chengdu for a couple of days. I'm going to miss having them around, they kept things... eventful! Haha! I wish them the best for the future travels!

Next goodbyes were to Fish, Vivian and Mr Qi, these were very sad as they've been our life line for the last 5 months! I am going to miss them so much!!



So then it was just Mike, Cecilia and I and a 2 hour wait for our train... We played cards and enjoyed each other's company before eventually getting on the train with help from some of the porters! We did have a stupid amount of bags...

We found our compartment and settled down! Thank goodness we decided to splash out on soft sleeper, it was just so much nicer! Then we were joined by a Chinese family of 4 who it seemed had booked one bunk for them all... This train ride was going to be interesting...

OK 2 of the them left so it was just a kid and his grandmother, thank goodness! We settled down and stuck a movie on, we were quickly joined by this kid! I don't know if he knew what was going on but he seemed to enjoy the Amazing Spider Man! After the film finished the kid wouldn't leave so we were forced to watch 'kid - friendly' things... We soon exhausted my Mr Bean collection and the kid was still here! We just want to watch movies and not worry about the audience...

Eventually he went to sleep and we stuck Mike's werewolf film on, it was ok actually. After it finished we settled down to sleep, it was only 9pm...