The Undertaker

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One of my students' English names is Undertaker. That takes a close second to Smite.

China nearly got the best of us and buried our dreams of a good break. Nearly. The Shenzhen Education bureau has had our visas for about two weeks to obtain our work visas. We have a week off next week for National Day, and most of us were planning on traveling. However, you can't travel in China without your passport because you need them to check into hotels or for obvious reasons if you leave the country. Not knowing when we were going to get our passports back put a serious kink in our vacation planning.

The other problem with traveling during National Day break is that ALL of CHINA has it off as well. This is particularly irksome in a place like Shenzhen, a city of over ten million, many of whom are migrants who want to go home to see their families during breaks. Tickets anywhere during this period are more expensive and in higher demand.

That being said, we had grand plans. At first we wanted to go to Yunnan Province to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge and hang out in Lijiang, Dali, and Kunming. After we were informed that we had to work Saturday and Sunday, we decided we didn't have enough time for a 14 hour train ride followed by a ten hour bus ride. So we decided on Zhangjiajie and Wulingyuan in Hunan Province, a mere overnight train ride away. Zhangjiajie is a UN World Heritage scenic area famed for its craggy mountains, winding valleys, and ethnic minorities. We went to get tickets at the train station and were told that we couldn't buy them until five days before we wanted to leave. When we came back, the tickets were sold out. Trains to Changsha, Huangshan, and Guilin were booked as well. Frustrated, we decided that it would be fun to take a train to Nanning and try to get into Vietnam from there. When we discovered it takes longer than two days to get a tourist visa for Vietnam, we thought about hanging out in Nanning, until we read the entry in the Lonely Planet guide:

"Nanning is a hard city to really love. It's got discouraging urban sprawl, no major sites and even worse, doesn't inspire the kind of enthusiasm among locals that sometimes win over visitors...Nanning is famous for its gourou huoguo (dog hotpot)...follow the crowds and take your pick."

Deciding to scratch that idea, we figured we could compile a short list of possible places that were left on the map and just see if there were tickets available to any of them. If not, we'd just say we didn't care where we went, just give us whatever tickets are available. Being too broke to fly anywhere (most of us were either awaiting our first paycheck or had realized that 5,000 RMB didn't stretch so far when you spent 2,000 of it on plane tickets), we knew we had to get out of Shenzhen somehow.

We bought eight tickets to Xiamen. Seven of those tickets are hard seats, and one is standing only. The trip takes 13 hours. We were trying to buy sleeper tickets so we could get some sleep on the overnight ride, but we decided we had to take what we could get. We're going to rotate who stands. With Fred's guitar, that's nine bodies to eight seats. Can life get any better? I SUBMIT THAT IT CANNOT!

Xiamen is a seaside city on the southeastern shore of China, near Taiwan. It's near some interesting islands and is supposed to be one of China's cleanest cities, Fujian's garden city. Colonial architecture dates back to after the Opium War, and supposedly beautiful beaches and old Buddhist temples adorn the coast. We could potentially bus it to neighboring sights or take a ferry to Taiwan, who knows. Hopefully it's as good as it sounds. Bring it China. What? Bury that optimism. I dare you.

We celebrated our victory with a McDonald's breakfast. Getting up at six in the morning to stand in line for train tickets is much more tolerable when you top it off with hash browns and a sausage egg McMuffin.

We got our passports complete with work visas back this afternoon at Chinese class. After a delicious dinner with friends near Ranjana and Serena's apartment, I explored the parts of my neighborhood that I had yet to see. The typhoon has cooled the city down a bit, and tonight was one of the most pleasant evenings I've experienced since my arrival. It reminded me of the evening walks Margaret, JoJo and I used to take around Fredericksburg after the merciless Virginia heat had died down. We'd walk from the apartment down Williams Street to Caroline and historic downtown. Past town hall, the Fudge Factory, Wine and Cheese Deli, the Blarney Stone, J Bryan's, and back past the dusty antique stores, the Loft, and Hyperion. I remember it with Christmas lights strewn through the trees, a bluegrass soundtrack, and crickets...so melodramatic. Rock me momma like a wagon wheel, rock me momma any way you feel...hey momma rock me. Rock me momma like the wind and the rain, rock me momma like a southbound train...hey momma rock me...

Three more lessons and then we're hitting the beach! Stretch your legs for me Sunday night (your Sunday morning), as mine will be crammed into a train compartment with hundreds of other transient southbound travelers. xoxoxo

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