The D3202 Train to Shanghainan

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Red China

There was one thing that I wanted to do before I did anything else while in Xiamen, and that was to buy a train ticket to Shanghai at the train station, then I could go ahead and continue on with my aimless wanderings around Xiamen. I accomplished that objective on my third day in Xiamen, China. I bought a train ticket that will take me from the Xiamen train station to the Shanghainan train station (Shanghai South train station) for ¥359 RMB. That's Renminbi for those of you out there who are unfamiliar with the Chinese currency. It means people's money I suppose because Renmin means people in Chinese and in China everything is supposedly owned or belongs to the people. That’s what communism is all about. It's the People's Republic of China afterall. A park is invariably called the People's Park. A museum of any sort will invariably have People associated with it, like the People's Museum of Avant Garde Art or the People's Festival of Film Noir or the Art Nouveau Exhibit at the People's Museum of Modern Art. I'm not exactly sure if any of the aforementioned institutions exist but if they did they would undoubtedly be named as such, such as, like Miss Teen South Carolina, as such. If you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, here's Miss Teen South Carolina's response as to why American kids in general are unable to identify a country at random on the map and to the state of education in the United States of America.

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.

Indeed.

Buying a train ticket in China where Western tourists hardly exist can be adventurous. I had been warned about this by my Chinese friends back home. I walked along Jiahe Lu from my hotel to the train station. It's a relatively short walk. It takes about fifteen minutes. Along the way you'll pass by a Carrefour, the French mega retailer, then you'll pass the circle where there's an overpass that turns Jiahe Lu into Xiahe Lu and then curves around the bend where a few paces away you'll see strip malls of endless restaurants, acupuncture clinics, convenient 7-Eleven like stores, small local retailers competing with one another, bus stops, and other such enterprises. Xiahe Lu is a wide and busy boulevard that's not easy to cross from one side to another, at least not for the non-Chinese, but there's an underground pass with an underground mall for your shopping pleasures that you can go down to and which will lead you to more shopping centers on one side of the road and the train station on the other side of this wide and very busy boulevard of Xiahe Lu. I took a leisurely stroll down the underground mall mainly to cool off from the midday heat but also to window shop and see what kind of merchandise I might wanna buy later on. They've got plain white shirts for ¥20 RMB. That is a little less than US$3 to you and me. That's pretty cheap. I've been told that the days of China being a cheap place to shop are long gone, but if you just look around a little harder and try to be a bit savvier with your shopping you can still find good bargains. There are shoes and handbags for sale, a few knick knacks for the friends and folks back home, and there's a supermarket cum super big box store of the Wal-Mart and Carrefour variety. I still haven't figured out how to pronounce Carrefour. Is it Carry-Four, or Care-Four? What the hell is it? Anyway, after fifteen minutes of strolling and window shopping I took the left exit at the end of the huge underground mall, which is about a quarter mile long, and emerged up on the outside where you'll see the World Trade Center building right next to the train station. Inside the World Trade Center is a Wal-Mart, the biggest superstore in the good ole USA, perhaps the world even, bigger than Carrefour or Ikea.

I stood around the train station looking for somebody who could speak English. I found absolutely nobody, so I decided to just get in line and risk looking like a fool by asking the ticket counter lady for a train ticket to Shanghai in English. I had no idea how she would respond. All I said was “Shanghai” when my turn came up at the ticket window. To my shocking and pleasant surprise she said “Today?” I said “Wednesday” excitedly, encouraged that she understood what I said and where I wanted to go. She then tapped a few keys on her computer keyboard looking for the next available ticket to Shanghai. There were no seats available for Shanghai on Wednesday, only Thursday and beyond. She even showed me the computer screen which shows the departure time and the arrival time in Shanghai. I had hoped for a soft sleeper cabin because I was told that that was the most comfortable way to travel. Unfortunately none were available for the Shanghainan train, the D3202, but I took the seat she gave me because I pretty much had no choice and it didn't seem all that bad. I figured out from the price she quoted me, ¥359 RMB, that this was a second class soft seat. That means six people to a cabin with four bunks, an upper and a lower bunk on each side of the cabin. A first class soft seat would only have four people per cabin. So I paid my fare and thanked the lady at the counter profusely for her patience with me.

With my train ticket tucked safely inside my wallet and stored safely in a secret pocket inside my backpack I was ready to roam around aimlessly about town. But first I needed to eat lunch. Where to go, where to go? Well right next to the train station is the World Trade Center where on the fifth floor is supposedly a food court with a good selection of food to eat, at least this is what the Lonely Planet guidebook says. Not that I ever really pay attention or take seriously any recommendations from Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, or any of those other ass wipes. They're merely a starting point for me to look for better places to find along the way, thus in that sense they're nominally useful. So I went inside the World Trade Center building to look for some good eats. Though it's called the World Trade Center it ain't no place for bond traders or equity brokers as you might expect it to be, like the twin towers in New York that were blown up by a bunch of Islamo-Fascist Jihadis from Saudi Arabia. At least it didn't appear like that at all to me. No sir. What I saw was simply just another shopping mall for the conspicuous consumer. On every floor there are retails outlets selling specialty goods, jewelries, electronic gadgets, western fashion wear up the yin-yang, shoes, handbags, watches, skin care and body lotion, eyewear, sports shoes, dress shoes, and novelty shops. I saw all of this while riding up the escalator to the fifth floor where the food court was. Like an idiot tourist I just walked around the food court to look for anything good to eat but it was hard to decide because I had no idea what anything would taste like. I saw pictures of bowls full of squids, fishes, and other types shellfish, but I wasn't in the mood for seafood at the time. I saw the usual plates of noodles and rice. Again, too familiar and ordinary, at least as far as Chinese food is concerned. I saw a tepanyaki bar and a sushi bar. No, definitely not something I want to eat in China. Korean food? Ditto. After fifteen minutes of browsing I was scratching my heard trying to decide what to eat. I was doing this while standing at a food stall which had a delicious display of Chinese pancakes with spring onions. I thought “Aha!”, that's the food for me. So like an idiot tourist that I am I went up to the counter and pointed at the pancake to the lady tending this here food stall. I didn't say anything but point. After speaking to me in Chinese and seeing that dufus looking dumb look in my face she quickly figured out that I'm just another idiot tourist who doesn’t speak a word of Chinese. So whatever I pointed at she put on the plate. I pointed at some pile which looked to me like smoke roasted duck and some sauce and some stir fried beef with chilies. I handed her a ¥50 RMB bill. She shook her head. More? She shook her head some more. So I pulled out a ¥100 RMB. She shook her even more vigorously. A state of confusion. What in the heck is going on here? The lady at the counter thought about it more a long minute, then she asked for help. A second attendant came out and pulled out a card to show me, and then she pointed to a counter just a few feet away from us. There were customers lined up at the counter to buy the same exact card that she was showing me. I understood. You buy a prepaid card at the counter to pay for your food. This is how it works in China's food courts. I have no idea why they do it this way but whatever. So I went ahead and bought a ¥50 RMB worth of prepaid card. That was more than enough to pay for my food plus a big bottle of beer. I still had ¥15 RMB left on my card. The meal was delicious by the way, whatever it was.

After lunch I walked down to the bus stop right in front of the train station. I guess train stations tend to be very busy here in China because it is the most popular and the cheapest way to travel, by train. Thus there are lots of people coming out of buses, taxis, and other vehicles to head for the train station. Across from train station at the corner of Xiahe Lu and Hubin Dong Lu is an ongoing construction of a new shopping center called Robinson's Galleria which is supposedly close to completion and will possibly open in the very near future. There's a chain of malls throughout the Philippines called Robinson's Mall or Robinson's Galleria which is owned and operated by Robinson Land Company. The majority owner of this enterprise is a Chinese Filipino named John Gokongwei. He was born here in Xiamen, in Gulangyu. He is another one of those overseas Xiamenese who went abroad to make his money. Although he is now Filipino in every sense of the word he has invested back to his birthplace of Xiamen. Good for him.

I took bus number 21 to Nanputuo temple. I knew from the Lonely Planet guidebook that you can take bus number 21 or 1 from the train station to Nanputuo temple. Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, and all those other ass wipes can be useful when it comes to providing guidance when it comes to transportation. For the other stuff you might as well find guidance in the back of a matchbook because you are likely to find better information there. I don't understand spoken Chinese, much less written Chinese. Written Chinese to me looks like just a bunch of sticks and knives put together to resemble an oriental looking house or building, with some dots thrown in for more confusion, a couple of characters resembling people or something, all put together inside a box. You put two or three of these characters or symbols together and I guess you have a whole sentence. One character is one word I suppose. Three characters is one sentence I believe, I think, although I'm not really sure because I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to translate these things. I’m just an idiot tourist. But I do understand Arabic numerals, you know, the numbers you learned in kindergarten. The numbers 1 and 21 are Arabic numerals, and when I saw a number 21 in red in front of the bus I jumped right in. I didn't know how much it cost but I saw ¥1 on the box where you're suppose to pay your fare, so I drop a ¥1 coin into the box. If I had dropped nothing into the box I don't think the bus driver would've noticed or much less cared. He had that deadpan look on his face which says that I don't really give a darn if you pay or not, just get on the bus so we can move on with our lives. And so I did. I sat next to a guy who kept hocking a loogie into an orange bucket on the aisle of the bus. I had heard about the Chinese propensity to hock and spit and hock phlegm in public but this was the first time that I had actually seen somebody do it, and he did it in style too. He would make this really horrendous sound like he was trying to suck out every inch of phlegm out of his lungs and hock it all down to that orange bucket in the aisle. I thought the orange bucket was for garbage. It turned that it was for this very purpose, to hock phlegm into. At one point along the journey the bus stopped for a full five minutes. The hocking fella sitting next to me got off the bus, thank god. The bus driver momentarily got off the bus as well to buy a pack of cigarettes. When he got back he walked to the back of the bus to spit out a huge ball of phlegm into the orange bucket near where I was sitting before heading back to the driver's seat so that we get on with our lives.

Nanputuo temple is another tourist attraction in Xiamen. I didn't really find it all that fascinating. You've seen one Chinese temple and you've seen them all. Just another place to burn incense and kneel down and bow down and pray. The Chinese ritual of worship is a bit odd, at least to me. With palms closed and held at or near the forehead they bow three or four times really fast. Sometimes they don't even really bow; they just bend their knees three or four time really fast. They don't even say anything, no Ave Marias or anything ridiculous like that. When it's all over they move on to another idol to pay their respects to and do the same dadgum thing all over again. But it looks less painful than what the Catholics do. I should know because I was born and raised in the Catholic faith. The Catholics walk on their knees from the back of the church all the way up to the altar with a rosary in hand. The rosary is for reciting the Ave Maria for every bead. I can’t remember how many beads there are on a rosary and quite frankly, I don’t even really care, all I know is that there are plenty. So for every bead an Ave Maria is recited, then you take one knee forward. Then you recite another Ave Maria and then you take another knee forward, and you do this until you reach the altar from the back of the church, on your knees, or until you drop dread, whichever comes first. That’s how painful being a Catholic is.

I don't know too much about the Buddhist faith but I suspect that the purpose for all of these rituals is to wish for themselves some good luck or a happy life or a good fortune, which is as good a reason as any to perform any sort of ritual I suppose. God only knows why people in general are so hell bent into doing rituals for good luck. Only God knows what the hell life really is all about anyway because none of us haven’t got a clue. We are all just wandering around aimlessly with our lives pretending to be heading in one particular direction when in reality there is no one direction that we can really choose to go to because in the end life is pretty much random and meaningless. At least that’s how it appears to me. That’s how ambivalent I feel when it comes to faith. I struggle with it everyday. It doesn’t mean I have none. It just means I haven’t got a clue.

There's a nice park outside of the temple where you can stroll and look at the lotus pond and catch a cool breeze while sitting underneath some tree and pondering the meaning of life. That's exactly what I did. I sat on a bench at the park under the shade of a tree nearby and just watched the scenery and the people for a little while. Then I wrote that little passage above that you just read, about Buddhism and Catholicism and the meaning of life, out of boredom. After I got tired of doing that, pondering about the meaning of life that is, not writing because I never tire of writing, I moved on and took a tour of the university nearby. It's a nice little campus. I have friends back in the Bay Area who actually went to Xiamen University so I took some pictures so that I could show it to them when I go back home. After I took enough pictures to provide ample proof such that yes indeed my Chinese friends back home will definitely believe me when I say that I visited their lovely campus, I settled myself on a park bench underneath the shade of a nice big tree and wrote some more. I see a group of college aged kids wearing a pink T-shirt with the words Peace Camp across the front and some sort of Chinese characters in the back with the words Peace Camp in small letters written underneath it. I suppose the Chinese characters mean Peace Camp although I could be wrong because as you know, I don't understand written Chinese. And as many of you know who frequent my critically acclaimed and award winning travelogue, I have been wrong before many times. But being wrong has got nothing to do with writing. Sometimes writing can be about a passion to express ones thoughts and opinions into words in order to make sense of this seemingly complicated and meaningless world of ours. But most of the time writing is just a remedy for boredom, to kill time until all time is wasted and lost, and then you move on and find some other form of activity to kill and wast more time with, like working nine to five for a living. At least that's what writing is all about for me.

Becoming a writer is the easiest form of vocation that one can become. It doesn't require any sort of formal training or education, other than knowing how to write of course, which you can learn in kindergarten. You can wake up tomorrow morning and say

I'm going to become a writer

, and if you pickup a pen and paper after deciding that you're going to become a writer and start writing, no matter how poor the quality, no matter how incomprehensible the outcome, no matter how grammatically incorrect your writing is, because you have it in your mind and your constitution that you are a writer because you filled half a page of paper with ridiculous nonsense, that makes you a writer regardless of what anybody else says. You write, therefore you're a writer. There's no question about it. And don't let anyone ever tell otherwise. You don't need to get paid a dime for your writings to be called a “writer”. As a matter fact you are less of writer if writing is your profession. You maybe rich and famous and wake up with strange women in your bed in the morning because you wrote a megablockster of a book, but in the end you're just a whore. You wrote for the man. You didn't write for yourself. You let the editors twist your words and change the very essence of your soul because fame and fortune was just too seductive, too titillating, too very very tempting and self gratifying to your ego. So you can take your New York Times Best Seller and those strange women that you wake up with in the morning and shove it all up your part of the anatomy where the sun don't shine. Well, maybe not the strange women. Just your New York Times Best Seller .

The D-Train

The D3202 leaves Xiamen at 1450. That's 2:50 pm for you civilians out there. I was at the station by 1330, which means 1:30 pm to you and me. Mostly you, not me, because I used to served in the military, but that's neither here or there. It's simply somewhere else. Like any train station in China, this one is a zoo. There are tons of passengers waiting everywhere. A young girl, about age eighteen, or so I thought, sat right next to me. There was no other place to sit because the train station is packed. She saw me writing into my little notebook. She smiled and when I caught her snooping and intruding on my privacy. Writing to me is not really a private matter. I'm willing to share everything that I write regardless of the quality of the writing, whether I think it's good or bad. I don't take writing too seriously. I write for my own amusement and for everyone else out there who might find it amusing. So in that sense I didn't really find any offense to the young girl peeking into my little notebook while I wrote. I didn't think she would've I understood a word I wrote anyway. So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote with the young lady looking on, all this time assuming that she did not understand written and spoken English. But what if my assumption was wrong? What if she understood every word being written that you now see right in front of your very eyes? This is what I'm writing right now, right this very minute, with that young girl looking on very intently. I looked at her right after writing that very passage that you just saw. She smiled again but said nothing. I smiled back and wondered if she understood. I had to find out if she really understood. So I pulled out my train ticket and asked in English if she is on the same train as me. To my surprise she nodded her head.

“Are you on this train?” I asked her while showing her my ticket which is written entirely in Chinese except for the words D3202 and the date written on the left hand side of the ticket. When she nodded her head it encouraged me. This means that I can actually have a somewhat meaningful conversation with someone here in China, where I know absolutely nobody and speak virtually not a word of Chinese. So the young girl and I started talking. She told me her age, which is twenty two, so my guess was wrong because I thought she was only eighteen. She said she learned English in college but had never had a conversation with anyone in English, so quite understandably her spoken English was rudimentary. But her cell phone had a Chinese-English dictionary, so whenever she ran into some difficulty with words she would pull out her cell phone and show me what she meant. That was quite delightful I thought, for somebody to go through that kind of trouble for a stranger to make herself understood. You'd never see that in the United States. No one I know would ever pull out an electronic translator of some sort to make himself or herself understood to a Spanish or German speaking person, let alone Chinese. No way. “Learn English son or get the hell out of my country” is the more common reaction.

The young Chinese girl of twenty two, which really makes her a young lady, showed me what the number 10 on the lower right hand corner on my train ticket means; that I'm on carriage 10. And what the number 58 means; that I'm on seat 58. She told me a lot of things about herself; she works for Lenovo, she is studying at some university in Hangzhou, she has never been to Shanghai but would like to go someday, and that she is going to surprise her best friend in Hangzhou by coming back a day early. Such a delightful young lady. While we were talking a young guy about same age as my new friend came up to us, pulled out the earphones from his ears, and started speaking to us in English.
“I heard your accent, so I can tell you're from America” is what the young guy said.
“I'm Felix. What's your name?” I asked.
“My name's Steve” he said. This guy was more fluent in English than the young lady sitting next to me. She just listened and smiled while this fella named Steve and I had ourselves an English conversation. I suspect that Steve is his Western name, a common practice among the young Chinese when talking to and/or making friends with foreigners. I suppose that's for their convenience and ours as well, otherwise idiot tourist like me would have a hell of a time trying to pronounce their names properly. We spoke for about fifteen minutes until he finally had to get on his train, which is headed for Shenzhen in the Guangdong province. I think he said Shenzhen but I'm not entirely sure. It sure sounded like Shenzhen to me though.

Our train finally started boarding after a twenty minute delay. I have never seen so many people being crammed into a train station at once just to board a train. The crowd finally thinned out when we got to the platform. I was on carriage number 10. My new friend was on carriage number 15. We exchanged emails and said goodbye. The whistle blew, or was it a horn of some sort, I can’t really remember and quite frankly, I didn’t care. All I really cared about was getting on my carriage before the train zoomed away and leaving me behind. Other people were worried as well because as soon as that whistle blew everyone ran like there was no tomorrow trying to get on their carriage. But the whistle was only a ten minute warning. I huffed and puffed and finally got on my carriage number 10. Now I need to find my seat, which is seat number 58. I found it quickly because it was on the very first cabin from the entrance to carriage number 10. But when I got there the cabin was full. So I showed them people sitting in the cabin my ticket. A couple of them left. It turned out that the two who left were part of a traveling group of three. They were hoping that the train would not be fully book so the just got on the same cabin and see what happens. When I showed up to claim my seat they had to go back to their assigned cabin. My cabin mates were pretty cool. There were six of us in there. Most spoke good English. Sitting right across from me was a young guy in his twenties who introduced himself as James. He was the best English speaker of them all. If my cabin mates had had an English speaking contest amongst themselves James would’ve won hands down without a problem. His friend sitting next to him is named Lo but he wasn’t as talkative as James. He was nice enough but he didn’t seem as extroverted as his pal James. An older fella sitting next to me is Zheng, but he says it like Zen, as in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If I had to guess I would’ve said that he might be in the range of forty five to fifty years old. He was a good English speaker as well but he spent most of his time text messaging or writing something on his cell phone. There was another older fella, older than Zheng, who hardly spoke a word. I didn’t catch his name even though he introduced himself to me. He didn’t speak much English but I don’t know if that was why he wasn’t very talkative. He was traveling with the two other people who just left to go sit in their assigned cabin. Maybe he misses them already and would rather be in the same cabin as those two. I don’t blame him. Finally there was a guy in his twenties, about the same age as James, who sat by the window. He did not introduce himself to anybody and he did not talk to anybody. All he did was lookout of the window and listened to music on his iPhone. It did not take long before we arrived at out first stop. I looked at my D3202 train timetable to see where we were at; Jinjiang, near Quanzhou, once the capital of Fujian, and was once the most prosperous city in the province. Now it’s just another city on the map. James saw me looking over my timetable and laughed.
“We got a long way to go. Just relax.” He said.
It’s only three thirty in the afternoon. We are scheduled to arrive in Shanghai South at ten forty-one in the evening. That’s seven hours away. More people came on board at Jinjiang. There are folding seats in the aisle. The guy sitting next to me, Zheng, got restless, so he got up, went out of the cabin, and sat on one of the folding seats in the aisle. He was still text messaging or doing something with his cell phone. We arrived at Fuzhou South. Fuzhou is the capital of Fujian Province. I didn’t find it interesting mainly because all I saw was the train station. The countryside had some interesting scenery but it wasn’t interesting enough to hold my attention for too long. By the time we left the Cangnan train station James and his buddy left the cabin and went to the dining car to get some grub. I still wasn’t hungry so stayed behind. Now there were only three people in the cabin; me, the guy by the window who hasn’t said anything all day, and the older fella who was part of the traveling group of three. The older fella was napping.

There’s flat screen television on the wall inside the cabin showing a Chinese movie. You can listen to the sound by plugging your own earphone into one of the sockets on of the audio box on the wall right beside the bunks. That’s exactly what the guy who hasn’t said a word all day did. He plugged his earphone into the socket and watched the Chinese language movie. So now his attention is completely on the flat screen television instead of out the window. I grabbed my point and click camera to take pictures of the countryside even though there was nothing interesting out there. Then on a whim I asked the guy who hasn’t said a word all day and who was now watching a Chinese language movie on the flat screen television if he could take my picture. To my surprise he smiled and took my picture. I didn’t actually talk to him. I just made a hand gesture with my camera and gave it to him. He took my picture and gave it back t me. I pointed the camera at him. He smiled when I took his picture. It turned out that he was a pretty cool guy as well. He’s just not very talkative.

We stopped at Ruian, some passengers got off, and on our way to Wenzhou south a chubby America girl in her twenties or thirties got on the train with her Chinese guide. She was the third foreigner I saw in the train. Onto Leqing, Wenling and then Taizhou where James and his Buddy, Lo, got off. James gave me a soul brother handshake and said take it easy. Zheng was still sitting on the aisle and text messaging. He wasn’t antisocial or rude or anything but either he was preoccupied with either work or staying in touch with his family, I think, although I’m not sure because I was too timid to ask him why he was spending so much time typing something into his cell phone. He has one of those smart phones with a key pad and a nice screen, like one of those Samsung kinda deals with an Android OS or something ridiculous like that. If that’s the case then I don’t blame him being preoccupied with his smart phone. My cell phone is not as interesting however. I have one of those flip phones made by Motorola that is way outdated. I got it in the spring of 2006 when I was trying to switch from a CDMA phone to a GSM phone. If you know a little about cell phones then you understand the difference between CDMA and GSM. CDMA means Code Division Multiple Access. It is a more sophisticated way of multiplexing modulated signals, like voice conversations, where your voice or signal is transmitted over the whole frequency band instead of the traditional one slot given to you in the frequency band. In the CDMA case all users use the same frequency and use the whole band of that frequency instead of a small slice of it. Then what about interference, aren’t all users gonna talk over one another if they all use the same frequency you might ask, and the answer is no because the trick is your voice is coded to switch over to a different frequency very rapidly in a somewhat random order, but not actually random but unique to the people transmitting and receiving the call, and random to everyone else not involve in the connection between two peoples. For example, I make a call. My CDMA phone, after translating (converting is the more appropriate word for the initiated) my analog voice into a set of digital signals, will provide another set of modulation that involves spreading those digital signals over a wide frequency band, basically scrambling the signal, where the switching or hopping scheme of the frequency is a unique code that is known only to the transmitter, me, and the receiver, the person taking my call. Thus when my call is finally transmitted out of my cell phone and into the ether at some 1800 MHz frequency or something close to that, anyone can receive it if they are listening to the same exact frequency, but they will only hear noise, because remember, that signal was scrambled, spread over a wide spectrum which seems random, which is what noise is, unless they happen to have the unique code to convert the frequency switching or hopping into a sharp tone that contains the message, my voice, basically descrambling it, and only the person I called will receive that code, supposedly, unless you work for the CIA or the FBI, in which case you can tap into anyone’s conversation and listen in on people’s private lives in hopes of catching an Islamo-Fascist Jihadi and prevent the collapse of the Empire State building. That’s how cool CDMA is. It’s bandwidth efficient.

On the contrary a GSM phone, which stands for Global System of Mobile Communication, is a more traditional way of communication, which is one slice of frequency for each user and each user is given a time slot in the order because there are only so many frequencies to share so that not only do you have to share frequency but you also have to share time. It’s a combination of FDMA, Frequency Division Multiple Access, and TDMA, Time Division Multiple Access. GSM is not bandwidth efficient. Then why in the heck did I go through all the trouble of explaining to you how cool and bandwidth efficient CDMA is and in then I said I switched from a CDMA phone in 2006 to a GSM phone if I thought that GSM is crap? Aha! Here lies the conundrum that you run into in this wide world of global communication and competition. First of all GSM phones use the 1900 MHz frequency band or something close to that and some other frequency band while CMDAs use 1800 MHz and some other frequency band. Why they can’t share the same frequency is another topic of discussion and it gets complicated, so let’s stay with this topic for now. Almost all of Europe and Asia and a majority of the United States use the GSM standard. Cingular, which is now part of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile use the GSM standard for cell phones. Only Sprint PCS and Metro PCS, a little player in the market, use the CDMA standard. I don’t even wanna discuss why the world is not embracing the CDMA standard because that’s a whole new topic. GSM frequencies in Asia, Europe, and North America are different. Most of Europe and Asia don’t support CMDA. Overall there are four frequencies in different parts of the world that use the GSM standard. Thus if you wanted to use your cell phone while on travel, either by roaming and pay an arm and a leg for it, or simply by switching to the local provider by replacing your SIM card, you’re best bet is to get a phone that uses that GSM standard equipped with the four frequency bands used in the different regions in the world. Therefore I had no choice because I love traveling and using the same cell phone that I use at home while traveling. I switch from my old bulky Sprint PCS phone to a new Motorola RAZR phone.

We arrived at Sanmenxian at sundown just about the time that I finished scribbling into my notebook writing a lot of nonsense about cell phones and CDMA. A peasant looking fella carrying a sack, for his clothes I suppose, and a fan, came on board and sat in place of where James was sitting in our cabin. Zheng was still outside and glued to his splashy smart phone. I just finished writing about cell phones. The peasant looking guy looked around the cabin and smiled but everyone ignored him. He looked somewhat disheveled. He had on a dirty white shirt, dark pants which had a broken zipper, and black Chinese Kung Fu shoes, the type that Bruce Lee wore back in the day. His face was unwashed and his hair was short, spiky, and dirty. A very provincial looking fella indeed. He smiled at me and said something to me in Chinese. I smiled back and said nothing because I didn’t know how to respond. He then turned to the older fella who was in a traveling group of three and said something, which I couldn’t understand. He probably said something like “What is this guy, an idiot or something?” If he had said that it would’ve been understandable because of me smiling back at him like a dufus without saying anything. The older fella who was in a traveling group of three was reading a newspaper and just completely ignored him. The peasant looking fella turned back to me and smiled at me some more. This is getting awkward. Here I am smiling like a dufus and not able to say anything intelligible to the peasant looking fella while he is smiling back at me and probably thinking that I am some kind of idiot. The older fella who was in a traveling group of three said “He wants to know if you’re going to Shanghai.” He said this with his attention fully on the newspaper, kinda like the conversation you have at breakfast with your dad while he’s sipping his coffee and reading the newspaper at the same time. The peasant looking fella was still looking around and looking for anyone who will pay attention to him. None of them did. The quiet guy in the corner by the window was watching the Chinese language movie on the monitor. The older fella who was part of a traveling group of three was glued to his paper. Zheng was still outside sitting in the aisle and completely absorbed with his smart phone. James and Lo have gotten off at Taizhou. I have no idea how to speak Chinese.

If the Chinese had any kind of bigotry in their blood it would be against people who are not modern, who are less educated than they are, and thus who are supposedly less sophisticated. I think that is the reason why this peasant looking fella is being ignored by this group of urbanites heading for Shanghai. Supposedly he is of a different class, part of an outdated group of people that they don’t wanna have anything to do with, a painful reminder of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution, the anti-bourgeois movement in Mao’s day, held back the progress of China. Mao wanted to humiliate the sophisticated and educated class, the bourgeoisie essentially, by humbling them, sending them to labor camps and re-educating them, sometimes never to be seen again on the face of this here planet Earth. After Mao’s death the Chinese shifted back to a bourgeois society, and slowly but surely they’ve advanced and modernized and consumed and made cheap products for other countries to consume, and after getting off work making iPhones and smart phones and xylophones and every kind of phones imaginable, they go home and eat dinner and consume some more. Mao is probably rolling over in his grave as we speak.

They make the vuvuzelas in Ningbo, those trumpet looking plastic horns that make an annoying B flat sound when you blow on it and is very popular among the World Cup soccer crowd. But I was too pre-occupied paying attention to my peasant looking Chinese friend to even notice that we stopped and left Ningbo an hour and a half ago. By now it’s now nine o’clock in the evening and completely dark outside. We have arrived in Hangzhou. I saw my new friend, the young lady I met at the train station in Xiamen, get off the train and walk onto the station platform. I got off the train to say talk to her and say goodbye. We talked just long enough to exchanged cell phone numbers and email addresses, long enough before the carriage door closes and the train departs, leaving me behind in Hangzhou to fend for myself. Actually that wouldn’t be true. Hell, at least I have a new friend to help me out if that had happened. When I got back to my cabin the older fella was now joined by the other two he was traveling with. The quiet guy on the corner who had not said a word all night had also gotten off at Hangzhou. The other two the older fella was traveling with was an older man about his age, and a lady in her mid forties to early fifties or so, I think, although I wasn’t exactly sure because it’s hard to tell the age of Chinese women. She could’ve been thirty eight or fifty eight and I wouldn’t have known the difference. The peasant looking fella was still with us and still being ignored by everyone inside the cabin, everyone except me of course. But I couldn’t speak to him. We just kind of looked at each other and smiled like idiots. Zheng was still outside sitting in the aisle and completely absorbed with his smart phone.

Shanghainan

Nan means south in Chinese. In computing NaN means Not a Number, but that’s neither here or there, it’s simply somewhere else. I’m repeating myself. Sometimes I sound like a broken record. I’m not a programmer and neither have I ever dreamed of becoming one. That’s for kids who used to get beat up in elementary school. Either that or they got beat up because they spoke French. As we approached Shanghainan thunderstorms begin to fall. It is raining heavily outside. I can tell from the streaks of water on the window. The older fella looks happier now that his companions are with him. He is more talkative now, often joking, and translating some what he is saying in English for my benefit. I don’t think his other two friends speak very much English. They are still ignoring the peasant looking fella, who is now sitting alone in the corner and napping. Zheng is still outside in the aisle and completely absorbed with his smart phone. After two hours of boredom we finally arrived in Shanghainan. If you thought the Xiamen train station was a totally zoo you ain’t seem nuthin’ yet. This place redefines the meaning of a train station that’s total zoo. It’s a total zoo beyond belief and of the highest order, several magnitudes above normal. Getting out of the station is just as challenging as getting in simply because there are just way too many people. After fighting through the crowd for almost an hour I finally got out of the station. Right away I was intercepted by a tout for a car ride to wherever the hell I wanted to go. I looked at the long line of people queueing for a taxi ride and I thought about it. It’s eleven o’clock at night. It’s hot and humid. The streets are slick and wet from the hard pouring thunderstorm that just passed. People are irate. So I listened to the tout. He said it’s a private vehicle, ¥100 RMB. Taxi rides to the Bund should cost no more that ¥50 RMB but I thought what the hell, it’s way late in the evening and I need a shower. So I took the ¥100 RMB ride to the Bund. That was my initiation to Shanghai, a ¥100 RMB ride to the Bund close to midnight with the streets dark, wet, and smoky, the weather unbearably hot and humid for this time of the night, not a very pleasant introduction. It was a short enough ride. We got there in about half an hour. The guy dropped me off at my hotel near the Bund by Huangpu River. I quietly checked in to my hotel, got a shower, poured myself a glass of whisky on the rocks, and watched HBO on television until I fell asleep.

3G networks and beyond are supposedly using WCDMA, which is a version of CMDA but not proprietary to Qualcomm. I don't know what that's all about and quite frankly, I don't care.

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Photos

Somewhere near Quanzhou
On our way to Shanghainan

Somewhere near Fuzhou
Fuzhou is the capital of Fujian province

Cangnan
Late afternoon on the D3202

Somewhere near Fuzhou II
I have no idea where we were at this point

Some Village in China
This is a typical scene on the D-Train

On the Aisle
There are folding seats where you can sit and look out the window or simply play with your smart phone.

A quiet fella
This guy is one of my cabin mates on the D-Train.

Me
The quiet fella took this picture of me.

Another train station
One of the many stops along the D3202

Sitting at the aisle
Another self portrait of me on the D-Train while the kid behind me looks on.

Comments

[liujun]

welcome to xiamen-a beautiful city
i just read your passage describing your experience in the city in xiamen,well I am studying in xiamen university-a beautiful university in china. in fact,many young people in china can speak English.When you meet difficulty in China,you can ask for help from young peole in China! generally speaking,welcome to xiamen!

[phaedrus]

thanks for the comments
As I wrote in this article, I did in fact meet a lot of young people in the train, in Xiamen University, and Shanghai who could speak English. It's when I need a cab to go somewhere or go to restaurants to get something to eat is when I ran into some difficulty. I love Xiamen by the way.