Beijing to Xi'An: From One Tourist Trap to the Next

Once I had finished playing around at the Silk Market, I headed out to the West Train Station. Chris had managed to get a soft sleeper, but they didn't have enough beds for both of us. I was quite poor anyway, so I volunteered to take a hard seat for the long train ride. I paid a third of what he did, but I was going to have to sit, without a bed, from sometime around 5 PM until 8 AM the next day. Oh well.

I sat down, and the social aspect of the hard seat cars kicked in. Within minutes, I had already begun a conversation with two girls who knew English, and with some help from them, I was also chatting with the other people in my area. I love that about hard seat. Not long after the train started moving, Chris text messaged me from 8 or 9 train cars up saying to meet him in the diner car.

Walking up 8 or 9 hard seat cars is a bitch. It's a tiring task, because you have to dodge all the Chinese people with standing tickets, and walk around them in an aisle that is really only wide enough for one person. By the time I had made it to the diner car, I was actually exhausted. Even worse, the door was locked to prevent any hard seat people from getting into the diner car. This was probably just to allow the soft sleepers a chance to get tables first, since they clearly have more money.

I finally got Chris' attention through the window, and he had someone let me in. I had my typical beer, with no food, as I try to eat before I get on the train. Train food markup can be quite harsh. Chris and I chatted for a while, while he ate and we sipped our beers. I was mainly eavesdropping on an American family sitting in another booth, listening to their impressions on China, and what they had paid for random things they bought in China. I thought it was quite clear that they had a lot of money, just from the names of hotels they were staying at, and what they had purchased.

Eventually, the father went back to the sleeper car, and the kids (our age) came over and joined us. We had quite a time, just talking about China, or the differences between China and back home. They also went to Atlantic City quite a bit, so we had a good conversation about gambling as well. It turns out one of the girls had been living in the south of China for about a year, and she was about to go back to the US, so the rest of the family came out and they were all touring China's main attractions together. Personally, I don't think the rest of the family is getting a realistic view of how China really is, but this is an opinion I have of many travellers, and I try not to voice it much. Actually living here shows you so much more about the Chinese.

We stayed in the diner car for so long that the waitresses were getting pissed off at us. This was because at around 11 PM, they start selling the diner car seats to people with standing tickets. They kept telling us to get out, or pay 30 yuan to stay. We pulled the old "Stupid Foreigner doesn't understand" trick, and managed to stay for quite a long time, and we even got them to serve us one more round of beer, even though they had stopped serving about 2 hours ago. Finally, we got tired of pretending we didn't understand (or in the case of three of the Americans, actually not understanding) so we all went off to our beds/my seat.

I got back to my seat, and fortunately, most of my new Chinese friends were still awake, so I got to chat quite a bit. I wanted to get a card game going, but the game they knew was slightly different in a lot of ways from the version I had learned in Beijing. What ended up happening is I got distracted by a third Chinese person who spoke English, as to my amazement, he had almost no accent. The others played cards with my deck for a few hours, then packed it up and went to sleep.

At one point, Chris came back to my hard seat with the two American guys, who were clearly quite hammered. I had been chatting quietly with the remaining people who were awake in the car, and they showed up yelling in excitement, and waking a lot of people. They were quite excited to see the "poor section". I made fun of them a bit in Chinese, since they knew absolutely none, and the Chinese people in my area laughed quite a bit, but once the Americans and Chris returned to their sleepers, everyone quickly fell back asleep.

I spoke to the new guy and one other girl for quite some time, until I realized suddenly it was 3 AM. I asked them if they were tired, they claimed no, but as soon as I came back from the washroom, they had already fallen asleep. This was fine, as I knew I should try to sleep anyway. Those two had really fascinated me, though. The guy had lost almost all of his Chinese accent while speaking English, just from watching American movies, and the girl rendered me speechless. She had actual, well informed opinions about world wide problems. Most Chinese won't even give you an opinion about whether or not a certain food/drink is tasty. She was well read in Western books, and she knew of Supersize Me, Fast Food Nation, and of Michael Moore. Needless to say, I was very impressed. That was one of the most interesting conversations I'd had with a Chinese person to date.