Tai'An: The train ride there

This was my last trip in China. I leave for Canada on the 21st, but I wanted to cram in one last sight, as China has some really nice mountainous areas. I've noticed during many of my trips that I tended to try and take pictures of natural things, not the touristy crap I complain about so often, so a mountain was right up my alley. Shandong province is north of Jiangsu province (where Wuxi is), so it was a close enough place with a famous mountain I was interested in seeing.

Tai Shan (The mountain I wanted to see) is in Tai'An, and out of the 5 Taoist Mountains in China, this is supposed to be the best. Unfortunately, I had to go to Tai'An to get there. I did not know what I was getting myself into. Tai'An has 5 million people in it, so I figured it'd be ok, despite the fact that the Lonely Planet literally has zero sights listed in Tai'An's section, except for Tai Shan itself. The city is so crappy and undeveloped, the people living there don't even know there's 5 million of them. I had native Chinese people telling me that there were maybe a few hundred thousand living there... More than a little off.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First off, the train ride from Wuxi to Tai'An. It sucked. It turned out my train had no letter in front of its name, which means it's the slowest of its kind. For a trip that should have taken 8 hours, at most, I ended up on a 14 hour train ride... standing. That's right, I had a standing ticket on a really crappy train. This train was also the lowest of the low I've been on. It brought a new meaning to hard seat. All the other trains I've taken had individual seats, with decent cushioning. This one looked like inside a school bus, if they took all the cushion out of the seats. Long, green boards made up the train seats, and they had mounted fans, mostly broken, along the ceiling, rather than air condition it.

I was planning to go climb the mountain at night, as many Chinese people do, since the sunrise is supposed to be spectacular from the peak. So my plan was to get to Tai'An at around 1 to 2 AM, maybe even as early as midnight, then head straight to the mountain, and climb it as quick as I could to make it there just in time for the sunrise (around 4 to 5 AM). However, the train I got on at 2:30 PM didn't make it to Tai'An until... that's right. Sunrise. I was not impressed.

Another really irritating part was that Shandong is full of people with horrible accents, and none of them are used to foreigners. For a long time on the trip, I had lost all confidence in my Chinese, because I couldn't understand any of the people in Shandong province. I thought my listening ability had gone in the shitter. The problem was none of them had any experience speaking to someone who's native tongue isn't Chinese, so they all spoke quickly, and with no enunciation at all. Just good old thick Shandong accent. They had no concept, despite my insistence, of speaking slowly or clearly. As soon as I couldn't understand someone saying a single phrase, they'd laugh at me, and announce to the entire train car that the stupid foreigner doesn't speak Chinese. They'd even go so far as to tell other people who wanted to try and chat with me not to bother, because "the foreigner doesn't know any Chinese".

This was extremely frustrating, for two reasons. First off, I know enough Chinese to understand the general subject of most conversations Chinese people are having without me in it, but none of the specifics. Second, trains are noisy, so often, I just couldn't hear the person over a passing train, or other people's chatter. Rather than repeat themselves, or speak clearly, they just decided I was an idiot. Then they'd talk about me for 10 minutes, and make fun of how I spoke, or that I was stupid and couldn't understand them... in front of me. So not only did I suffer through the frustrations of not knowing enough vocabulary to understand everything, which is a common enough feeling normally, but I had to sit and listen to them make fun of me for 10 minutes.

By the time the train had finally made it to Tai'An, I was happy to get off, and felt like punching half the car's passengers in the face. Shandong's accent is somewhere between Beijing dialect, which I understand because Beijing people see a lot of foreigners, so they speak clearly, and Southern dialect, which is close to Wuxi dialect. However, it's a horrible mishmash of both, and they spoke very quickly, so it was near impossible to understand. Most of them weren't even speaking Mandarin, they were speaking their native dialect, which is specific down to the city, not even a province. Thanks to this train ride, I was exposed to the famed racism China's foreign visitors know oh so well, for far far too long. I had experienced it many times, but never to this degree.