Fuddland

Since we have a whole seven days off work, starting tomorrow night, Alan and I thought it might be fun to get out of the city for a while and head north, up to Mǎnzhōulǐ — the city where I was originally supposed to be placed — and see a bit of the countryside along the way. The train journey takes nineteen hours, and because the rest of the country also has a week off, booking early is advisable. Herein lies the first of our problems.

The train to Mǎnzhōulǐ travels from Běijīng, through Shěnyāng, and onwards north. For reasons that nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain to me, one cannot book a ticket on this train from Běnxī — and believe me, we tried [via our lovely friend Annie] to book them locally. We had to go to the station in Shěnyāng. Frustratingly, the tickets went on sale on Saturday, so we lost two days due to teaching committments. Thus, unsurprisingly, we didn’t book early enough, and by the time we’d gotten to Shěnyāng on Monday morning, it was standing room only.

This meant that, theoretically, we would be on our feet for the entire nineteen hour journey, so we decided not to buy the tickets, and tried to think of a contingency plan. On returning home, we discovered we had one or two glimmers of hope:

• It was pointed out that people may get off at one of the stops soon after we board at Shěnyāng, enabling us to snag a seat or — and we should be prepared to pay through the nose for this — a sleeper, for the chance of a lie-down.

• If we can figure out who the right person is to talk to on the train, we can try and bribe our way to more comfortable arrangements. [This has been suggested by more than one person, and as I understand it, is quite a common occurrance.]

We will have the fact that we are foreigners on our side — if my experiences up to now are anything to go by, they’d want to impress us with their hospitality on the train, although I’m sure this will make me feel terribly guilty if I do get a bunk and I have a poor little pregnant ninety-year-old lady on crutches carrying heavy shopping standing right next to my bed the whole time. But at least I can roll over and look at the wall instead.

After some to-ing and fro-ing, we decided to just go for it and buy the standing-tickets. Of course, this meant going back to the station in Shěnyāng. But! Luckily, in the meantime I had befriended a Swedish chap who coincidentally lives in Shěnyāng, and he very kindly volunteered to buy the tickets on our behalf. Aren’t people nice?

Between the disappointment of not being able to book a couple of sleepers from the outset and discovering the above options, I spotted a rather interesting building in Shěnyāng, and was able to get a nice shot of the clouds reflected in its windows. [In fact, photo-fans, due to the size of the building, it is several photos cleverly pasted together.]

#1

Thanatos | 2006 / 04 / 29 – 01:50

A welcome addition to any English-language dictionary, that: I’ve been ‘Shenyanged’. Perhaps we could also come up with some synonyms and antonyms in order to get it into the thesaurus as well?

#2

David | 2006 / 04 / 29 – 08:08

Re #1: What’s another word for thesaurus? ;)

#3

clair | 2006 / 04 / 29 – 14:00

Thesaurus : bookwhatyoulookstuffupin.

Hmmm…doesn’t quite have that concise quality you tend to look for in a word.

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