My next stop in China was little bit different from normal tourist path. Luckily for me I had an opportunity to visit smaller Chinese city, Jiaozuo, which was about six hours by train from Beijing. City itself was interesting place to see as city itself didn’t had basically anything interesting to see. It was city for people to live and work. And still it ws full of interestness to experience as everything you saw was real Chinese life. There were no tourist places, no tourist traps, and definitely no traditional tourist scamming around. Just people living.

Then what was in the city? During the train trip I noticed that almost everything I saw was greyness, all the time when I watched out of the window I saw grey. Sometimes I just saw flames and grey smoke. And other times just grey. The same continued in the city, but I don’t know was it just weather or pollution that made it grey. There was sunshine, but still overall what I felt was just greyness.

But when night felt, city changed. In nearby city square I heard loud music and people were dancing there, just enjoying their evening. Mostly it was older people, but sometimes there were also some younger people dancing as well. One charactericts of the city was that it was full of scooters. In other cities where I had been in China so far, there were always many bikes and scooters around, but Jiaozuo, seemed that most of the people were using scooters to get around.

Being in the city where you expect nobody speaks English I got surprised few times. On some mornings my hotel breakfast restaurant staff greeted me in English, other days another staff member was just talking Chinese though. One of my biggest surprises was that in Jiaozuo there were few signs that pointed out in English where was place to have Chinese food or where toilets were. Just makes me wonder how many English tourist the city gets per year… But funniest moments were when I walked on the street and heard many “Hello”s behind my back. Seemed that local kids were interested of starting to talk in English with me but had only courage to greet me afterwards. Longest discussion I had was “Hello, welcome to China” and this discussion happened after person talking to me had walked about ten meters past me :D