Sleepers & Super8

Our train from Pingyao to Beijing was 13 hours and overnight. We started at 9:30pm, so it didn’t take me long before I was ready to hit the sack. I figured sleeping the majority of the time would make it go faster.

Steve's bunk is up top

A few things about sleeper cars: there are two types, hard and soft (1^st and 2^nd class basically). The soft have four bunks to a cabin and a door you can close. The hard have no door and six bunks to a section. The top and middle bunks aren’t tall enough for a grownup to sit up in but are fine for sleeping. For the people in these bunks, there are fold down seats on the opposite wall of the carriage with a small table for each two seats. The bottom bunk had enough space to sit on, and many people (sometimes people for the top or middle bunk if they are friends of the person on the bottom bunk) will sit on the bottom bunks and hang out with one another. The train provides you with a pillow and blanket, regardless of the type of sleeper you’re in. The blankets are really thick and warm and the pillow is just an average pillow. 

waiting for the snack cart to arrive!

We personally like the top bunk the best, partly because it is the cheapest out of the three, but mostly because it offers a certain amount of privacy. If you are on the bottom or the middle, anyone walking through the carriage can and often will look in on you, and in our case, stare at us. But when you are on top, you are too high for people to look in on you. That’s nice, because one thing that has happened a lot thus far is us being stared at. Lastly, the bathroom facilities on the sleeper trains are much like those throughout China—smelly and a little unpleasant, but nothing one can’t manage.

We hadn’t had the best luck, it seemed, the first go round in Beijing, so we were hoping this time would be different. Nope. The metro to and from Beijing West isn’t connected yet and we couldn’t find the connecting section, though it surely wasn’t far from where we were. So we tried another option—the bus. With traffic and stops, it took us over 30 mins to get to Beijing Main station, from there we could take the subway to our hotel, which was to be a short 10 min walk from the station. Ha. Yeah right. We walked. And walked. And walked. And still no sign of the hotel. So finally, Steve forged out while I stayed with the bags. After searching and walking for over an hour, he came back to report that we were nowhere near our hotel, but that he had the correct location of our hotel, written in Chinese. So we grabbed a taxi and we finally made it to the hotel.

It was a Super8 (yep, they have them here too!) near Wangfujing Street, located in a hutong (who-tong: an old neighborhood with narrow streets hardly big enough for two cars at once, most of which were torn down in Beijing when the thrill of the Olympic Games being held there was at its peak and also just as the city expands and commercializes). The staff spoke excellent English and the rooms were inexpensive yet clean and nice. It was a good place to stay that’s near attractions but not at the cost of being right in the middle of the action.

We stayed there for a total of 3 nights. Was supposed to be 4, but with a mistake on the hotel’s part for our booking, they were full for one of the nights, so we had to stay just down the street at a not so nice hostel instead. The other 2 nights we were in Beijing, we got to lie in the lap of luxury at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Wangfujing Street. We’ve run the gamut as far as accommodations in Beijing, that’s for sure!