Taking the train in China is never a dull experience; however, it is only when doing so without companions that you really get the full experience. In a massively complex turn of events (the details of which I will spare you), I ended up buying a ticket to go from Xiamen to Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai, as a half way point on my trek up to Beijing by the 8th of August. Little did I know, this train was not the 6 hour train Lonely Planet mentions, oh no…. this train takes a full 22 hours to get from Xiamen to Hangzhou. Needless to say, I found this out about 10 hours into the train ride and simply didn’t know what to say. Allow me to also interject the detail that I had sprung for the considerably cheaper “hard seat” ticket rather than a bed on the train. Luckily I was prepared for the train thanks in part to my 3 years of Chinese classes and to the large bag full of snacks and treats that Amy (my friend in Xiamen) insisted I take with me.
I had noticed before that Chinese people always tend to bring lots of ramen and other little snacks on the train, but I had forgotten the extent to which the train can become a veritable feast. Just to give you an idea, I saw a group of 4 near me during one part of the journey demolish 4 bowls of ramen, a family sized bag of wasabi peas, some chicken legs, fruit, and some other miscellaneous snacks (note they only were on the train for a few hours and it was not during lunch time). Gradually over the 22 hours on the train, I managed to demolish my apple, pre-packed sausage, coffee cake, mini-bread loaf, packet of Oreos, sleeve of gummy lifesaver-like candy, bowl of ramen, water, tea, and half of a giant bag of haw flakes that were in my goodie bag. The sights and sound of crunching and munching are essentially omnipresent on the train until about 1 am when people finally start to fall asleep in any and every position possible. I luckily got an entire row of 3 seats to myself for the last several hours of the journey from 3:00 am to roughly 8:00 am.
It’s really quite surreal now that I went through it all. The cherry on top of the proverbial pie is, of course, that in order to be in Beijing for Ben Turman’s 21st birthday, this afternoon (in fact, in 2 hours) I will be boarding a 15 or 16 hour bus to Beijing from Hangzhou. I already hit up some fruit stands, so I have my dinner of green tea, oranges and bananas in my bag.
It’s hard to explain the entirety of the 22 hours of that train trip, so instead, I will provide you with a few of the more “memorable” of my memories:
1. The man who (at 3 or 4 am) hacked up a massive amount of phlegm and subsequently spat it on the floor of the train. [note this woke me from my sleep for all of the 30 to 45 seconds it took for this to occur]
2. The young child who sat next to me (on his mother’s lap) who was inordinately terrified of me was nothing if not memorable. If I moved too close, he started to cry, until he finally started playing a game with me that involved holding his finger out E.T. style and coming very close to touching mine until he would get too scared and pull away. This eventually led to a game of passing the milk bottle around and pretending to drink it and saying that “it’s all gone.” (a much more entertaining game when played in Chinese) Making this entire thing more interesting still is the fact that he was dressed, in typical Chinese fashion, in pants that have a massive slit running from just north of his rear-end to just south of his navel (yes, that means that all of his business was out on display for the entire world to see. The existence of these outfits will NEVER make sense to me – NEVER).
3. The woman who could not understand why I can’t understand everything everyone always says in Chinese when I’ve studied abroad before in China and have actual Chinese people as Chinese professors. Note I could only understand about 30% to 40% of what she said in her garbled, mumbled, thick, rural, Southern Chinese accent. For those of you who are not as familiar with Chinese, the spark notes version of this irony is that in Southern China, they do not pronounce the Chinese sounds “r,” “zh,” “sh,” and “ch” the way it is “supposed” to be pronounced according to rules of standard Mandarin. This result of this is that the Southern pronunciations of Mandarin have about double the number of homophones than Chinese normally haves, making it 麻烦死了(troublesome to death) to understand.
I could probably go on and on, but I will leave it there, as I’m sure I will share many more memories from that ride later on. I can safely say, however, that my exhausting stint on the train was not for nothing. It essentially forced me to use my mandarin with no option of simply giving up, instead I had to use my dictionary and explain myself as best as possible, resulting in my Chinese vocabulary growing to include such important terms as 隧道(tunnel) and 营养(nutritious).
Hangzhou also proved to be a veritable smorgasbord of examples for my research. I ran around collecting photos that I was probably not supposed to be taking inside of the mall of example after example of many of the things I’m attempting to prove for my honors thesis. I felt like Templeton in Charlotte’s Web, only I am leaving Hangzhou with a large number photographs rather than bloating to three times my natural size – though my eating has not be largely incessant since arriving in China. The crown jewels of my eating experiences thus far have occurred in Xiamen, where I was taken to eat by Amy and her boyfriend (now Fiancé) Aaron. For lunch we went to a restaurant acclaimed for it’s spicy dishes and devoured some spicy green beans, cabbage, chicken, and beef which were only surpassed by that evening’s meal at one of Xiamen’s most famous seafood restaurants where you select the fresh seafood you want and they cook it up for you. We were number 50 something on the waiting list when we arrived around 8:30pm (note that I’ve only once ever waited to be seated at a Chinese restaurant before and that was at a famous Peking Duck place in Beijing). The seafood was incredible – shrimp, octopus, fried noodles, and a plate food of clams that were, in a word, incredible. We feasted and feasted until we could feast no more.
I fully expect Beijing to be more of the same since I have birthday festivities to look forward to. I’ll keep posting as I can since the CCP isn’t exactly a fan of blogspot.
As pictures are difficult to upload at this point, I will provide a link to my snapfish account where you can few what I've managed to get up thus far (this should work, please let me know if it doesn't): http://www5.snapfish.ca/snapfishca/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=4130747028/a=6541516028_6541516028/
No comments:
Post a Comment