The Road More Travelled

I have now completed my loop (circumbobulous perfection, one could say) in China and am now back in Shanghai. My last note was I believe from Kashgar. After Kashgar I took the train (which is a pretty nice train, really) back to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang and incidentally, the farthest city in the world from any ocean. Furthest. Most far. Whatever. Why anybody bothered to figure that out I'm not sure - it was probably someone from CITS (China International Travel Service) which throws into grave doubt the accuracy of the figures, but anyway.

From there I wanted to take the train to Beijing. The train ticket office in the hotel didn't actually have any train tickets, (they should just call it "office") so I went back to the station. After pushing in line (one doesn't actually wait in line here in China, one pushes) for 45 minutes, I am told to come back at a later time to buy this ticket which I do; another 45 minutes, I am told to go to another ticket office to buy the ticket, which I do; I am told there are no tickets for the next four days; so the next day I go to the above-mentioned CITS.

I first went to a CITS office in Turpan, where they were closed for the winter, and second in Kashgar, where they told me that it was impossible to reserve a ticket in Kashgar from Urumqi to Beijing and that it would be no problem to buy it in Urumqi… So here they told me that if I couldn't get a ticket at the ticket office they certainly couldn't either. What did I think this was, a travel agency or something?!

So I went next door to the Holiday Inn Business Center where a quite nice person tried for a long time (on the phone, like travel agents are supposed to) to get me a ticket, and in the end got me an airplane ticket (that was all of four hours before the plane left) at almost four times the cost of a train ticket. But, it was like three hours instead of two days and something. And that allowed me to get to the Vietnam embassy in Beijing in time to give them my passport for the weekend to chew on and give back to me Monday, which was all good.

Other than that, Urumqi was just cold, that is about all that I remember: another hotel without a shower head, another hotel front desk lady who wanted to know how to say "luggage room" in orally legible English, a Chinese fast food place called "Best Food" which wasn't best but was complete with the red sign and golden arches serving hot instant orange juice with the value meal, a bakery where the girl who got me my coffee was so excited that a waiguoren came in that she was literally dancing to the music behind the counter, but still too shy to say anything in English or Chinese, and more Chinese concrete highrises... OK, so I did remember some things!

The funny thing in the Beijing airport, after arriving there at ten pm or so, was the guy trying to sell me a hotel room. I asked about a place listed in my guidebook that sounded nice, and he said "bu hao" (not good) I asked why, but he couldn't come up with anything better than that. I asked if his hotel had dorm rooms, and he told me, with a perfectly straight face, apparently expecting me to believe him, that dorm rooms were really quite dangerous and that I should avoid them. Frankly, breathing the air in China (outside of Tibet and Xinjiang) is more dangerous than any dorm room I've ever been in, and I had to laugh at him. Then he gave up on selling me anything and attached himself to some other hapless tourist...

First I went to the embassy to get my Vietnam visa process underway, then I bought a train ticket to Vietnam (which took the rest of the day) and tried to buy a ticket to Shanghai at the same office (which involved waiting three hours while somebody's brother sat in traffic inching toward the west train station with a ticket that turned out to be for the wrong day...) And went to the other train station to the "foreigner ticket office" which was packed with chinese (hmmm) where I bought a soft sleeper ticket because I was too tired to think about spending the next day searching for creative ways to get a hard sleeper ticket.

Instead, I spent the next day searching for creative ways to get money - the 1st ATM was broken, the 2nd ATM was not happy with my card, the 3rd ATM seemed happy enough but said I should contact my bank, the whole idea of getting a credit card cash advance while my passport was not physically on me, but in an embassy, (making me a non-person), made everybody laugh. Actually, the bank manager said I could come back next week when some other office was open and fill out a form to do it. So after the taxi back from the bank, and paying for the hotel until 'next week' I had literally fifty quai in my pocket ($6.20?) and two days to explore Beijing...

The next day, (after eating raisins from Turpan, a leftover banana that was a parting gift from my friend in Kashgar, and a seven quai bowl of chicken and cucumbers which was very good,) the ATM worked. The same one I tried first. I don't know why. And there are no internet cafe's in Beijing. They closed them because last summer there was a fire in one of them and twenty some young people were killed. I'm waiting for someone to set fire to the PSB office to see if they close all of those down too...

Anyway, in Beijing I went to a teahouse/bookstore place to drink tea (this place was really cool) and listen to Chinese classical music - an erhu, a pipa and a 'flute' (I don't remember what they call those in Chinese) player. That was fun. It was also slightly unnerving because there were only a couple Chinese people there, too many foreigners! But still fun, and I was among the only waiguoren who knew how to say anything other than "xiexie" (that is Thank You - with a Louisiana accent).

And I went to the Great Wall (that was my last 200 quai) which involved about five hours of preliminary exercises like a Jade factory and Ming tombs and a Chinese traditional medicine
"yourliverhastoomuchheat-youneedtobuysomeherbs-heretheseareonlythreehundredquai-yesyoucanpayinAmericandollars-thisisthechinesesecrettolongevity-thankyouverymuch-ohyoudon'twantthem?!?!" kind of place.

Lunch was funny, I was at the table with all the other foreigners on the tour (there was some people from Beijing and some Taiwan Chinese), an American, French, and an Egyptian couple - none of whom could really eat anything with chopsticks. It has been a long time since I met a foreigner so foreign that they couldn't eat with chopsticks! We did eventually get to the Great Wall, which was a good place to exercise the lungs. I had a good time climbing for awhile, left most of the other people behind so I had a bit of solitude, and it was really cold so there was not all that many people there.

The next day, after getting my visa, I sat in Starbucks in a happy daze - mostly from my visa and the sudden realization of how soon I am going to be in Vietnam (I have not yet lost my love of going new places, just as long as I don't have to first push through a line for an hour to buy a ticket, and then sit on a hard seat or sleeper bus to get there) and also from the general warmth, the coffee, and the completely unreal atmosphere that places like Starbuck's have in Beijing. Then I walked around Tiananmen Square, and through the Forbidden City, had fun practicing my Chinese with more people who never see foreigners talking Chinese.

The train back to Shanghai was, well, soft sleepers are not worth the money. They have TV, and actual compartments with doors, and only four beds instead of six, but soft sleeper people are snobby... The funny thing is that they aren't really any softer than hard sleeper, just a little wider. And it is good to be back in Shanghai, kind of funny to be done travelling, back 'home' but not home...