Pictures!

So we did in fact go on our trip to Pingyao, the ancient walled city. We took the bus down for an amazingly inexpensive 10 kuai each (about $1.25), though we had been warned away from the bus (a cab would be safer, we were told). The bus was actually pretty great; we made friends with some Chinese students who were traveling to Pingyao - it was kind of too loud and bumpy for conversation (and also none of our linguistic skills were really up for it), but they asked if we had pen and paper and we spent a long time passing notes to each other (I am a beautiful girl, they are nice boys, and we have an invitation to visit them at their college if we have time). Eventually the girl sitting on my other side got in on it, too, and wrote a note saying, "I want to communicate with you, but my spoken English is very bad. What is your name?" which maybe expresses the spirit behind most of our interactions with anybody in China. She lives in Fenyang (the guys we were talking with don't; they are going to college somewhere nearby learning to be PE teachers) and is going to the medical college to become a nurse, though it is not her dream. I don't know what her dream is; she was going to tell us, but the bus got to a bridge we couldn't drive across (there were giant piles of dirt and mud in the way) so we had to get off, walk across, and switch buses ("Don't lose the foreigners!" says the driver), and when we got on our new bus, she wasn't sitting next to me anymore.
Anyway. Pingyao was beautiful. Here are some pictures.Once upon a time, the city was prosperous - it was the site of the first bank in China - but it became less prosperous and was never modernized. Now it is famous as the best-preserved walled city in China, and it's prosperous again, though now as more of a tourist destination than a hub of trading. The center of the old city (there's a newer, modern city outside the walls) is a pretty-much-no-motor-vehicles zone.
At night, the city is lit with red lanterns. The whole time we were there, it was raining and cold, and at night, everything glistened. It was nice.

This is silly and blurry; that glowing thing behind me is the Market Tower (or something like that, we think).

Two views of the courtyard of the hostel we were staying in (Yamen Hostel; it was recommended by the Lonely Planet). The first is at night and the second is when I woke in the morning and snuck out of the room to find breakfast before my roommates woke.

In addition to breakfast, I found a friend.
That day, we bought a ticket to get into most of the museums in the city. It also let us through the gate to get up and walk along the wall, and we walked around from the North Gate to the South Gate. It was easily my favorite thing that the ticket got us into; it was quiet and peaceful and offered a different view of the city.
After walking outside in the cold and wet for a few hours, we stopped in a different hostel and ordered some hot chocolate that was expensive but was also made with real milk and chocolate and, more importantly, was hot.
We spend two nights in Pingyao. The second morning we took the bus up to Taiyuan, the provincial capital, where we did nothing but buy cheese and butter.
Annnnnd that's what we did with our National Day holiday. More later.