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Published: April 26th 2008
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Me on the canal
They made me wear a name tag in case I got lost. It had a phone number on the inside! Shanghai has got to be one of the most challenging places I’ve ever been to since no one speaks English. It wouldn’t be a problem if I weren’t a complete moron when it comes to speaking Chinese. I can’t even say “Tsing Tao” beer or the Chinese word for “thank you” properly. Pretty much every word I try to say in Chinese is greeted with a confused stare.
My first experience with the language barrier came when I booked a day tour to Zhouzhang. It’s about an hour’s drive from Shanghai and was touted to be the “Venice of China”. The town is laid out along various canals, so you need to travel by boat from place to place- even if you’re only going a short distance. It sounded really cool and I was kind of happy to get out of Shanghai for the day. Shanghai is an economic centre- basically a sprawling urban space with lots of huge space-age type buildings.
The tour guide picked me up at 7am and we picked up a few other people from various hotels before we were on our way to Zhouzhang. Along the way, the guide provided an extremely long winded
history of... something. I really have no clue what she was talking about. I didn’t understand one word of it. This continued on for the next several hours. The town was absolutely beautiful but I think I was a bit of a nuisance to the tour guide since I kept zoning out and wandering away from the group. The funniest part of the day came at lunch, when I misunderstood the menu and ordered enough food for 10 people. I was brought five fish, two giant heaping plates of veggies, and a bowl of rice big enough to feed a small town. (I was just happy they didn’t bring me the pigs feet, tortoise or the “rural chickens”.)
Language became a huge problem when I tried to buy a train ticket to Beijing. There were about twenty lines at the Shanghai train station, and each line had about thirty people waiting to buy tickets. Out of the twenty lines, there were two that offered an “English speaking service” - but of course, there weren’t attendants at either of those booths. (I’d like to note that there wasn’t anyone at the booth that offered “smiling service” either.) Armed with my
Grandma's tea
In Zhouzhang, "Grandma's tea" is a specialty and there were a lot of nice little places to sit and drink... request printed out in Chinese, I attempted to buy tickets with a non-English agent. After 20 minutes of waiting, I was shooed away without explanation. I was pretty frustrated at this point, but then I noticed that an agent had appeared at the English booth.
When I finally made it to the front of that line, I was told that there were no tickets available for the rest of the week. That’s what I get for being relaxed about my travel plans. The population of China is 1.3 billion- that’s 20% of the world’s population. So, when you’re making plans here, you have to keep in mind that there’s a good chance that a few thousand other people are probably making the exact same plan as you.
To make a long story short, I ended up buying a “standing room only” ticket. The train from Shanghai to Beijing is 13 hours long- it leaves at 8:30pm each evening and arrives at 9:30am the next day.
This is what I get for knocking the luxuriously comfortable hard sleeper.
This train ride was probably the strangest and most interesting experiences of my life. There was room for about
a hundred people in our compartment, but I’d guess there were close to a hundred and fifty people on board. There were people everywhere. The aisles were crammed. People were sitting on their luggage, on the bathroom sink, standing… there was not one square inch of that train compartment that was not being used. Luckily for me, within 5 minutes of being on the train, a group of young students called me over. They wanted to know where I was from, why I was on the train alone, and why on earth I bought a standing room ticket. They squished together on their hard seats so I could sit with them. I could only partly fit on the seat but I was so grateful not to have to stand.
Each person had brought a huge bag of food. I ate every kind of Chinese snack you can imagine. Someone bought me an iced tea. People gathered around to ask me questions about Canada and my trip in China. A boy came over and sang the Canadian national anthem. I shared seats with people for almost the entire ride. Everyone was so nice to me.
At one point in
the middle of the night, I moved to the floor and caught a few Z’s on a piece of newspaper. The floor smelled like urine and I felt like a hobo, but there were sixty other people doing the same thing, which made it seem not as bad. The squat toilet was the worst part of the experience. The toilets in the hard seat compartments must not be cleaned as frequently as the hard sleeper compartments. You would not want to see a photo of these toilets!
After 13 hours, we arrived at the Beijing railway station. Safe and sound and with lots of new friends. It’s not something I would ever do again but I’m definitely glad I got to meet so many interesting people and it gave me a new appreciation for trains in Canada.
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Train trip in China is terrible
I am a Chinese, I hate the train transport in China. I cann't understand the existence of standing ticket.