Taiyuan

On our final day of travel, we got up very early and were out the door by seven in the morning. Because there were no train tickets available, and no bus to Beijing leaves from Pingyao, we had to go to regional transportation hub, Taiyuan, to get back to Beijing. We managed to get a bus quite easily from the bus station, but the trip to Taiyuan took longer than expected due to very bad traffic in the city. Upon arrival in Taiyuan, we tried to get bus tickets to Beijing were told that we had to switch to a different bus station. At the next bus station we bought our Beijing tickets for 1:30 so that we would have enough time to go to the museum, which martin was very keen to see. Overall, Taiyuan is a reasonably pleasant city (as far a Chinese cities go), but was very smoggy. On our way to the museum, we passed the coal mining museum of China. The Shanxi Provincial museum is brand new, and unlike the other two provincial museums we went to (Henan and Shaanxi) there was no massive lineup. We got our free ticket and went right in. The museum was very well presented and is the best museum I have seen in China. Unfortunately the best exhibit, about architecture, did not have any English captions. We had a quick lunch after the museum, and hopped on the bus. For a snack, I bought some delightful spicy baozi. For the entire eight-hour bus ride they showed dreadful movies full of murder and torture. We got into Beijing at nine in the evening.