Hotel

I went on a weekend trip to the near-by city of Tianshui with some friends from the U.S. and Canada. We enjoy going on trips; it's great to get away from classes and studying, and we all want to see as much of China as we can while we're here.

Train tickets are cheap, hotels are cheap, and food is cheap. We still like to get the best deals we can. In fact, during our trip to Tianshui, we stayed in a very strange "hotel" to save money.

For less than $3 per person, the five of us spent one night in an elementary school that had been turned into a hotel. What this means is that the desks were removed and beds were brought in. That's right- there were no bathrooms in the rooms. And the community bathroom in the building did not have a shower.

Furthermore, the lights in the hallways were turned off to save money on electricity. I don't even need to mention that this hotel was very dirty, do I?

The conditions may sound awful, but to my friends and I, the dirtier and stranger, the better. I sometimes compare it to camping: What fun is it to stay in a lodge when you could stay in a tent? It's the same for us in China. We could stay in nice hotels, but we might as well be back in America.