China adventure begins
Travelling by train, relaxing, lying down …..yes, lying down, having one chinese person lying above and below me. Got an opportunity to travel by night train. I already finished eating my instant noodles with smoked ducks’ necks as a proper passenger in China and now I’m getting ready to sleep, reviewing all the things I have experienced ever since I came to China.
It has been a month now. Still getting used to the overuse of air conditioning everywhere, extremely hot weather or XXL portion sizes in the restaurants, cars beeping all the time for no particular reason, people looking all the time, crowded places, overcrowded places and more than overcrowded places, or hearing these huge bugs making noise in the trees ( am always scared one of them is going to attack me at any possible moment ) and lots of other things that are just part of everyday life here. The journey started in Beijing where I attended the summer camp. Thanks to this summer camp I managed to see many beautiful places, eat nice food and live in a hotel like room for free….wait, what? Yes, for free. I don’t know how it is possible but there is a summer camp like this organized every year and anyone can attend…so I did ( check out more about BICC summer camp if interested). Am already missing the grandma from the canteen. I was eating at her place every day, sometimes several times per day since I could not read the names of the other foods at other places. So I just stuck to her and I am glad I did. The food there was delicious, did not get tired of it even after 20 days eating the same thing…
We saw all the necessary things that a tourist has to see like Great Wall, Forbidden City, Bird’ s nest and other places. Got to know many nice taxi drivers that had such strong Beijing accent and talked so fast that I coud not understand 50% of what they were saying. So I just nodded and chuckled politely trying to act as if I had understood everything. Unfortunately, they always noticed that I was only nodding my head to avoid some kind of an awkward feeling (the one you get when you have to ask someone to repeat the same thing 5 times because you still cannot get it)
Anyways…from Beijing we travelled to Shanghai. Night train, hard sleeper. We travelled with one family from Shanghai who were excited to have us there. At least that is how I felt because they talked to us a lot and showed us the entire photoalbum of their family on their cool iphones.
Hard sleeper is pretty convenient, instead of paying for the hotel and then for the speed train that could amount to 800 yuan, you have a decent bed, bathroom (notice how I left out the word “decent”) and hot water always available on the train for about 300 yuan from Beijing to Shanghai. On the train you have that cool adventure like feeling while listening to the sounds of the radio, people talking, sound of the video games, seller’s voice selling fruit, newspaper, toilet paper, tootbrushes or shoes…basically anything. And as you thought you would not be able to fall asleep to this noise, you “pass out” within couple of minutes. Shanghai family had their food neatly packed in a huge bag. We had nothing much, just couple of packs of pocky. “Next time we need to come prepared!
Three days in Shanghai included lots of walking, lots of water, lots of sweat and lots and lots of people in the subway. We tried to live cheap, eating baozi for 2 yuan everytime, living in the hotel with no bathroom door, not shopping a lot but the money still seemed to be disappearing fast. It must have been that bubble tea that I am somehow obssesed with. And also subways…we used it all the time and experienced it at its best times and at its worst times when we could barely move. Got to know the painter who was painting these special pictures of random people in the subway. He asked me to draw him, which attracted the attention of the people on the train. There were people trying to get closer to see my “work of art”. Obviously I did not do as well as he did but people were still having positive comments about my cheap creation. I managed to say the only sentence in Shanghai dialect which blew the old painter away and he started talking to me as if I was fluent in it. Good times.
Next stop is Xi'an. Let’s see what awaits us.
