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.