Rosa goes rural

Hello!

We've been to a rural area of China. We met a girl called Cui-Cui who was 11 yrs old and liked playing 'Go Fish' with us, although she called it poker (I worked out later that they called any card game poker).

They had a little cat who was three years old but looked like a kitten. They had a white fluffy hen with two fluffy chicks, plus they had a hooligan of a rooster who crowed all night long. I was very good, because I sat in a restaurant for ages whilst everyone ate and I had nothing I could eat [the rice comes last] and I didn't even complain or anything.

We were staying in their house with small pillows and so Melissa used my travel pillow. She lost her pillow in the night and woke everyone up blaming me for stealing it - Mark came in with a light and found it right by her! She said I'd threw it there but I was asleep!

When we were coming back to Beijing there were no sleeper train tickets available for three days so we had to go on a plane from Jinan. We were supposed to be staying in the hotel run by Yujin's ministry, but Yujin's friend decided to put us up in the best hotel in Shandong - which is one of the biggest provinces in China. It was really, really posh, but mummy couldn't sleep because the pillow was too big and she didn't want to order a buckwheat one, which she could have done. The hotel rooms had a bath - which was wicked, because we'd only had showers for ages.

- Rosa