Day 3: I can't actually remember the name of the town. It was a little place near the yellow mountains.

We got into the Huangshan railway station at a bit after 4 in the morning, which is a rather inconvenient time, considering that normal buses don't start running until a decent hour and we sort of had to get to our hostel in the next city over. We ended up taking a private bus. Or, rather, three private buses. I was pretty out of it, but the other girls say that we spent a good half hour driving in circles while we were on the first bus. Then they kicked us out and told us to go to a second one, which claimed to go to our hostel, but actually just kicked us out and told us to get on a third one. We were getting rather worried at this point, and annoyed that we had to pay for three buses when we were expecting one, but we finally did arrive.

Everyone else except Rachael just crashed in the room for a few hours, but I looked off our balcony and saw this view:

And I was like, I have to run around that place. It turned out that the hostel had super, super cool grounds with climbing structures and old walls with gates in them and a steam train front (what is that part called again?) and all sorts of pretty scenery. They had a climbing wall that I really, really wanted to climb on, but I wasn't sure if I was allowed to and the belay device was different than I am used to, so I didn't. I did get out my camera and take lots of pictures, though.

When people woke up we spent the rest of our day walking around the town, enjoying the scenery and taking more pictures.

Day 2: 19 1/2 hours on a train

Theme song: "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey

(Mostly because of the line "She took the midnight train going anywhere." It came up on my music player near midnight and it made me laugh really hard. Probably because I was tired from being on a train for 14 hours. At midnight.)

We got up early the next morning and got on a train to the yellow mountains. And stayed on the train for the rest of the day (until 4:00 am the next morning, actually).

The first thing you do when riding a train in China, is you go wait at the train station with everyone else waiting for your train. It looks about like this.

 

Except the waiting seats were all taken by the time we got there, so we looked more like this:

Chinese trains are really interesting. You can buy tickets for either "sleepers," which are little cot things set into the wall, or "hard seats," which look about like seats on a tour bus. Hard seat tickets are quite a bit cheaper, so we got them for all of our trains.

There are five seats across, with three on one side, two on the other, and an aisle in the middle. One thing about the aisles in Chinese trains is that they aren't empty. People can buy standing tickets for trains and then they just hang out in the aisles or by the bathrooms. There are also carts that come through the aisle selling stuff, and the standing people kind of just squish into you until the carts pass. It makes it a bit difficult to get up and go to the bathroom (that is, if you are brave enough to go to the bathroom in the first place. I will show a picture of a squat toilet later). It is definitely an experience.

The seats face each other, rather than facing the back of another seat, so I got to spend 19 hours staring at a Chinese guy who I had no way to talk to (I swear, he didn't move the entire time. He even slept in the same position that he sat in). There is a little table that extends from the wall about 1 1/2 seats. The window seats are the best for sleeping, since you have a wall and a table to lean against. Plus you get to look out the window, which is really fun. The aisle seats are the best if you want to be moving around a lot. The middle seat on the one side is just really terrible because you can neither sleep well nor move well.

I had a window seat for this ride, but I didn't get a whole lot of sleep, since the lights didn't go out, and I hadn't quite figured out the art of train-sleeping yet.

Day 1: Guangzhou

We hadn't originally planned to stay in Guangzhou during our vacation, but the train times ended up working out that way. We took the fast train there (it takes about 45 minutes) right after we were done teaching classes so we had an evening to do whatever we felt like. We found our hostel, dropped off our stuff, and went out to explore. We saw something that looked like this:

We thought that the contrast between the old style tower and the very modern tower was rather striking. The modern tower was too far away, but we managed to find our way to the pagoda. It was surrounded by a little patch of rather thick forest with very loud crickets and a dark little path leading up to it. The door was barred so that we couldn't go inside, but it was very cool.

We wandered around some more, decided to go eat somewhere, and ended up just going to KFC. It was very large and super busy. I knew that KFC was popular here, but it was different actually seeing it. I would compare the food to the KFCs in America, but I don't think I've been to a KFC in America since I was about twelve, so I can't.

We finished off the day with a mooncake party in our hostel because, after all, this was the moon festival.

Post-Beijing Blog (the first of many)

I've now been home from my Beijing trip for more than a week, so this is me finally getting around to starting blogging about it. I will do a separate post about each place we went to, but that may take a few days. I mostly just wanted to post something to let ya'll know that yes, I am alive, and I will get to posting more.

First of all, here is my group. In the picture we are at the Zhongshan train station all ready to set off.

From left to right, there are Lindsay, me, Savannah, Ashlee, and Rachael. Everyone is my roommate except Ashlee, who is my honorary roommate. They are all awesome.

Statistics:

Length: 12 days/11 nights

Stops: Guangzhou, Yellow Mountains, Beijing, Xian

Total cost of the trip: US$480

The cost covered:

12 days worth of food

7 nights at hostels (the other nights were on trains)

7 train rides covering a total of approximately 6,000 km

Transportation around the cities (buses, metros, taxis)

Entrance fees to various sites

Souvenirs

I went slightly over-budget, which was not surprising, considering how small my budget was, but this is still amazingly cheap compared to what I would pay for a similar vacation in the states.