Chinese French Toast Torture–lost somewhere in Central China
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008Changsha, China.
I feel so behind on the blog! It’s Mongolia that did it. We were away from computers for so long, and then with traveling back to China and moving on from Beijing right away I didn’t have time to really sit at a computer until it’d been a week or so. A lot (but nothing terribly interesting) has happened since we left Beijing. The night train turned out to be one of the worst nights of my life. We got the soft seats, which sound pretty pleasant especially after so many night buses of dubious quality in South America. But it was terrible. We made sure to leave the hostel 2 1/2 hours before our train so that we had plenty of time to take the subway to the station and figure everything out. When it was our turn to board we confidentally walked down the platform starting from a car in its late teens and walking down the way towards the beginning of the train since our car was #1. We got to the end of the platform and we were at car #2. So logically we should get on this car and walk through it to car #1. Nope. Car #1 was at the exact other end of the tran. After car #20. What a bunch of crap. I still don’t understand it. It was completely ridiculous. So now we had to walk all the way back down to the other end of the platform with Chinese people running past us making us incredibly nervous. When you don’t understand what’s going on or being said people running is a bad sign. But we just walked quickly determined to just jump on any car if the stupid train started moving. But we got to our car safely and got on to find out seats. The next strange thing was that our seats weren’t beside each other but across the aisle from each other. The seats were arranged in pairs on each side of the aisle and every other pair had at least one person in it. We had no idea how to ask someone to switch us seats and we highly doubted anyone would trade their window seat (which you could lean against) or their two seats to themselves (which you could lie down on) for an aisle seat by someone else. The next bg surprise was that oru seats didn’t recline. Not at all. At first I thought this was because our seats had a sort of glass wall behind them, but when I looked around none of the seats reclined! What’s going on? It was ridiculous. How are you supposed to sleep in a seat that not only doesn’t recline but that is rigidly upright. I’ve never sat so upright in my life! I tried putting my neck pillow on, but it just pushed my head forward into my chest! It was miserable. I barely slept all night, and when I did manage to pass out I’d wake up shortly there after in some incredibly uncomfortable slumped over position with parts of my body I didn’t know existed throbbing! I’m getting older, I think. My body can no longer comfortably slump. What a horrible night. I remember waking up at one point thinking it had to be close to sunrise and asking Steve (who just accepted he wouldn’t be able to sleep and was reading–something I’ve never had to accept since I sleep so well) what time it was–3 a.m. 3 a.m.! We weren’t arriving in Shanghai until 7. I had four more hours of torture before we could get off. I was not happy. And to make things worse the guy across from me (who had two seats to himself) was happily downing a six pack and rocking out to his headphones in a wife beater t-shirt while staring at me. For hours. I knew before coming to China that it’s acceptable to stare and that people were going to stare at me, but this was a little too much. Every time I’d wake up, he’d be staring. And he was facing me with just a little table between us. I was exhausted and angry and frustrated by the whole fact that crappy buses in S. America that were falling apart were more comfortable than ths brand new looking train in China when we weren’t even in the cheapest hard seats! And this man was staring at me. It was creeping me out. I tried to just keep my eye mask on so at least I wouldn’t see him. Miserable, miserable night.
montarsig