What a spate of karma!

Our time in Beijing was winding down. A little spurt of travellers' karma help to carry us through the final hours and on to our night train.

First, we had returned our bikes from the previous day after the rental place had closed. The bicycle man still had our deposits, and we had the lock keys. With our trip to the Great Wall starting at 6am, we couldn't swap in the am. We had to squeeze it in right when we got back from the wall, hopefully before the 7pm closing time. But we hit bad Beijing rush hour traffic. Then we had to switch from the coach bus to a little minivan. We inched along. Finally, finally, we got back to our hutong. We ended up running down the street, right as the bicycle man was closing up shop and beginning to bicycle home. We swapped keys for deposit and all was good.

Then, we went back to our neighborhood dumplings and noodles shop for a second go.

Somehow, it is not quite clear, but we ended up with this bowl of tomato and egg soup. It wasn't bad, nice and warm with some good flavor. But we thought we had ordered (different) kinds of noodles and dumplings.

Sadly, we did not succeed with the noodles, revisiting the previously-had soupy beef noodles. Same as the day before, though this time they tasted perhaps worse, tinged with disappointment.

We were more successful with the dumplings, getting pan-fried dumplings. And, we got so many of them (that is two orders). These were tasty, hot and crispy. They were a bit charred in places and sometimes the wrapper came undone, but they were only Y6 each, so I shouldn't demand perfection.

However, that wasn't the part with karma. That came from the table of gentlemen sitting next to us. One of them took pity on us and helped us order the above. More importantly, as we were eating, they got a scrumptious looking batch of lightly pan-fried, round dumplings. That is what we wanted. Max, audacious as ever, asked the man what those were called. He then very generously shared them with us. He also toasted with us, filling our glasses.

That felt a lot like three perfect days in Beijing. To Ha'erbin!