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Published: September 6th 2010
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Kayleigh and I started our 3 week adventure by taking a 40 hour hard (yingzuo 硬座) seat train ride from Beijing to Urumqi (Wulumuqi 乌鲁木齐). At first I thought it was not so bad compared to the hard seat we took to Taishan, but then more and more people with standing tickets got on at every stop until the aisle was totally packed. Going to the bathroom was always an ordeal. (To Taishan I just didn’t go, but for 40 hours that was not an option!) The aisle was so packed that there was nowhere to step and it was quite tough to squeeze through and also wake up the sleeping people in the way. The bathroom place is also exactly where people go to smoke so I remember getting a lot of smoke blown in my face while waiting.
Being the only two foreigners in that part of the train was pretty funny and interesting. A lot of people wanted to talk to us, so we had a lot of funny conversations with our neighbors. As soon as you say you are an American, people respond, “Oh, you must be rich!” And then they ask how much the plane
ticket is from America to China, how much a typical American salary is, etc, and then they convert it to RMB and think we are loaded. This is something we encountered throughout the whole trip. I don’t think we are as rich as people thought we were, because we are students who really couldn’t have afforded several thousand-dollar plane tickets without that nice government scholarship! Also it was hard to get the idea of an exchange rate into some people’s heads. If a bottle of water is $2 USD in America and $0.50 USD in China, of course American salaries must be higher! This one guy in particular, had a small speaker thing (with tremendous bass for its size!) and he was playing techno remixes of classical Chinese songs and trying to get this cute little kid to dance to it, but she was not interested. He asked us how much money villagers (nongmin 农民) in America make, but we just said we didn’t think America really had that kind of villager or villages like China has (nongcun 农村). Then he asked us what group (minzu 民族)we belonged to, but again we disappointed him by saying that we just know
that we are white and made of a random mix of European immigrants. He was like, “yeah but what group are you?” China has 56 distinct groups that often have their own culture, clothing, the same religion, food, etc. He thought every country would be just like China, which I guess is understandable.
The girls across from us were both from Hami, Xinjiang and on their way back home from school in Beijing. We mainly chatted in Chinese, though they both spoke pretty good English. One of them had Lady Gaga and other good stuff on her cell phone so we had a sweet singalong one night. One thing I quickly noticed is that it seems like people do not often use headphones (or do other things to keep quiet!) when taking public transportation! So if one person wants to watch a TV show on some hand-held thing, well then the whole bus is going to listen to that TV show. Our Hami friends got in touch with their friend in Urumqi and arranged for him to meet us at the station and show us around. They said that his English name is T-bag (apparently from the show Prison
West of Beijing
Lots of green, agriculture, small towns. Break??)! We could not stop laughing!!! One time a woman with a standing ticket asked our Hami friends to move their luggage from under their seats. She then put down some newspaper and slithered her way under until we could just see her feet! Also sleeping under our seat was our little friend who we called xiao pengyou 小朋友. My sneakers that were on top of my bag kept falling forward and it seemed like my bag kept moving forward, as if they had minds of their own. Finally we realized that someone was down there moving our stuff around. Then a little hand came up from underneath our seats to say hello! We played a game with the hand for a while, where we would give it candy (“haw thick soup”… only the best!) and the hand would throw it up in the air. Then the hand disappeared and a face popped out! Then the whole boy slid through, stood up, and walked around so he could slide through again.
I liked taking the train because we got to see so much of China! From Beijing, we saw lots of green hazy (pollution) hills and villages. Everywhere, people
had cut a series of plateaus into the hills so they could farm up there. Then Gansu was very long - it seemed like we were in Gansu forever. The mountains were brown and barren and very pretty. There were leftover plateaus cut in the hills but it didn’t seem like people were farming them. Gansu looked pretty hazy too. Then on our final morning of travel, we watched the sun rise over the Gobi desert and finally we were out of the haze that seemed to start in Beijing and kept going way out west. I was thrilled to see blue sky and real clouds, which I rarely saw in Beijing and really missed. Out there, there was hardly any development around, just our train tracks in the middle of nowhere. When we finally got off the train in Urumqi, all of the colors were so bright! I had forgotten what things looked like without pollution. It was as if someone turned up the saturation on everything, it was all so vibrant!
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