China Travel - Chapter Five of Nomadic Gatherings
Nomadic Gatherings by Michel Guntern
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Nomadic Gatherings: Chapter Five: China Travel.
Buying train tickets for travel in China can often be a problem, with five-day waits and people camped at the station.
And what if you can't speak Chinese?
1.
Travel by Train in China:
Window tables were piled high with food and soft drinks for the two-day
rail journey and in the restaurant-car kitchen staff sweated and chopped
vegetables.
2. Train Carriage Commune:
The whole carriage was like a commune, for two days everybody would eat
and sleep together; sharing their lives with no barriers; sixty bunks to
a carriage.
3. Meeting The Passengers:
Chee Lu was a 26 year-old medical graduate travelling to Shanghai for
two week's holiday.
4. Why Go to Shanghai:
Two young girls were travelling to Shanghai on business. They worked in
a Friendship store, but it took some effort to coax any English out of
them.
5. First
Stop at Huaihua:
The train had travelled for nearly nine hours before its first stop at
Huaihua Shi.
6. Reveille to Piped Music:
By nine o'clock most of the morning greetings were over, the window
seats were taken, and faces next to the glass watched a moving scene
hardly change.
7. Jinhua to West Lake:
Fresh supplies were bought; a selection of biscuits, preserved prunes,
cakes, Cola, and orange juice were passed around the hard-sleeper
commune.
8. Approaching Shanghai:
People packed their bags, stored away remaining provisions, and the two
girls coloured their faces; to the amusement of some of the wrinkled Mao
survivors.
9. Visiting Suzhou:
I walked in some of the famous gardens before losing a couple of hours
in the bazaar; the restaurant and trading area around the Taoist temple
Xuanmiao Si.
10. Shanghai
Character:
Couples went to the Yu Gardens and Wuxingting Teahouse to photograph
each other; old men in blue to watch them and smile at the changing face
of China.
11. Last Night in Shanghai:
It's rules and lack of initiative that plague the traveller trying to
secure simple but essential things like accommodation and travel in
China.
12. Shanghai to Beijing:
There appeared to be no queuing system in the ticket office and, like
everything else in China, everyone pushed to get attended to first.
13. Ticket Office For Foreigners:
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again. The
nineteenth-century proverb is so apt for buying train tickets in China;
where persistence pays off.
14. Night Before Departure:
It is not advisable to wait until the night before departure to buy a
train ticket in China, but in Shanghai I needed to take this route to
reach Beijing.
15. One More Card to Play:
When we had the office to ourselves again, I finally secured a ticket to
a town an hour away from Beijing. And after all my troubles, at a local
price.
16. On The Train to Tianjin:
People on the platform at Wuxi scurried like ants in the sun. Barrows of
food and drink were pushed under the noses of the more affluent
passengers.
17. Nanjing & Yangtse River:
On the east bank of the Yangtse, Nanjing is famous for the overthrow of
the Yuan Dynasty by a peasant rebellion led by Zhu Yuanzhang.
18. No Rest on
Sunday:
It was Sunday, but men and women in straw-hats busied themselves in the
fields, flailing rice and tying up the stems. Children helped too;
carrying water.
19. Late Sleepers, Early Risers:
I struggled to sleep again; the old man below me sucked and slurped his
noodles. Even after I presumed him to have finished, he sucked at his
teeth.
20. Arrival in Tianjin:
I had a telephone number of a girl in Tianjin, so I thought I might as
well spend the day in town before catching an evening train on to
Beijing.
22. Family Sun:
Family Sun lived on the fourth floor of a concrete block. He greeted his
neighbours with his foreign pet close at heel, they looked up and smiled
at me.
23. Next
Stop, Beijing:
The Tianjin waiting room was like a cattle station. Passengers for
various trains waited in allocated rows behind metal gates.
Nomadic Gatherings
- by Michel Guntern.
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Chapter Six:
The
Northern Capitals.