So much for quiet Wuxi life... I forgot we bought tickets to go out to Xuzhou. Chris bought the tickets for the hell of it, since his friends at the Kindergarten he works in used to live there. Every Chinese person we've mentioned it to keeps telling us not to go there, that there's nothing to see... We'll see. Chris is convinced there are terracotta warriors there, but I'm not so sure.
The train ride there took 10 fucking hours, despite it only being a 4 hour trip. We apparently caught a cheap train, which will pull over and stop every time another train is coming. My knees were killing me by the time we got off the train, but along the way, I finished Rant, which was excellent, and we made some friends who spoke surprisingly good English. I also managed to get everyone else excited about Rant, so they're passing the book around.
We arrived in Xuzhou at 1:30 AM. Our new friends helped us not only get a hotel room, but took us to the rooms, and made sure we got in OK. Score one for Chinese hospitality! They went way over the top, and we were very thankful.
The key for the hotel rooms deserves a paragraph of its own. The key was just a flat metal slab with a ball bearing near the base. It was rectangular, with curved corners, and there were no distinguishable marks on it. How each key was unique, I have no idea. Our key was stubborn as all's hell, and every time we needed into our room, someone had to come help us. They never had much of an issue, but never revealed the secret of opening the door to us. Even our nice train friends didn't know how to open it, so it couldn't have been a stupid foreigner moment.
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