2476 Kilometers Later…
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007Well, after 24 hours and 15 minutes on the train, we have arrived in Beijing! It’s funny though, people said that the hard sleepers on the train would be a challenge to take for that amount of time… but in all honesty, the hard sleepers (4th class) are cleaner and more comfortable than the 2nd class air conditioned cars in India. I don’t know why they still call them “hard” sleepers. The beds are padded and you get a really big fluffy blanket and pillow too. I guess in a way it’s good that people in Hong Kong think that hard sleepers suck because I think there was a total of maybe 10 people on our car so there was nobody sleeping on the beds above us. The food was decent too… not great but it was good…. of course, it was chinese food.
Upon arriving at the station in Beijing (it was a direct train -no stops in between), we walked out to discover that we might be in over our heads with the language thing… heh heh. Everything that has english letters simply spells out the phonetic sound of the chinese word. So… after a whole bunch of pointing to either John’s mandarin phrases book or a handy sheet that my uncle peter gave me, we figured out how to take the bus from the train station to our hostel (for 1 Yuan!). The bus wasn’t that packed when we first got on but stop after stop, it got more and more crowded…. luckily, we were able to somehow communicate with a lady on the bus to tell us when we got to xiajiankou or something like that. I think John will be extra happy because there is a Dairy Queen and a McDonalds really close to our hostel.
Now we are sitting in the common room of our hostel waiting for our food. As those of you who know us can probably guess, we didn’t order chinese food. I mean, there are good Chinese foods… but John and I have been up to our ears in Chinese food for the past few weeks… we’re from Sherwood Park and Stony Plain… come on, you can’t seriously expect us to be able to eat that much Chinese food when we are raised on steak and potatoes.
Anyway, tomorrow, we will be going to the Great Wall at Mutianyu and the day after, we will be going to the Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace, and Forbidden City. Ummm, I think that’s it from us for now… C’ya!
cheng.ev