Beijing train ride

Blog will be devoid of pictures until I buy batteries.

Had one of the best train rides ever the other day. I left for Beijing at around 10 Pm on Sunday night. The train was full of people going back to work after going to see the Expo for the weekend. I couldn't get a sleeper so I had to get a hard seat. Hard seats come in all varieties from what I have seen. Most seem to be wooden seats, with around 6 people sitting around a table. Better trains have cushioned seats with the table, while the newer fast trains from Beijing to Shanghai have individual seating with 3 to 2 seats per side of the train. I was sitting on a medium quality hard seat with 6 people sharing a wooden table in the middle. The train was overcrowded and a lot of people had bought standing seats which happens when no more seats are available. these people were standing around or sitting on little stools, until night came and people fell asleep on the ground all around, sleeping under benches and in the corridors.

I was sitting with 6 interesting people. The first one I met was a Chinese American English teacher from California. For some reason he did not seem so interested in speaking Chinese and mostly wanted to speak to me in English (as opposed to the others in Chinese) - definitely a banana, white culture yellow skin. He was very friendly though. When I met him he was trying to talk to the old man across from him. This man was obviously a migrant worker, his first words to the English teacher had been "I am from Hebei". He then said he was a labourer, but for some reason I was the only one to understand, I think I am developing a skill in understanding very bad Mandarin, not to mention speaking very bad Mandarin. This old man then proceeded to sleep for the rest of the journey, not saying very much and basically being there.

There was a northern girl next to me who also spoke very good English, she was a translator at CCTV where she watched English news and television and translated it... She used to be an English teacher and so the English teacher guy talked to her when I was ignoring him. She didn't seem to like CCTV and wouldn't say where she worked until people forced her to. When she reluctantly agreed to say it, people made fun of CCTV. I agreed. The main proponent of Anti-CCTV comments was a Shanghai man of about 35 years. I guess he was a small business owner going for a business trip to Beijing. He was short in stature, and I guess he had probably not been to university, but he was very intelligent, and we shared a lot of political ideas. He spent the whole train ride speaking about politics with whoever would listen to him, and I was one for listening. I think it all started when I showed the English teacher the book I was reading about Mao Zedong "Red China" written in the 1930s by journalist Edgar Snow following a trip to northern China were he met Mao Zedong and much of the Chinese Communist leadership. Our Shanghai friend opinionated that the book was crap because it spoke positively of the Communist Party. I was obviously surprised because this is not the type of things you usually hear from Chinese people. He then went on to  say that Mao was a tyrant and that Deng Xiaoping was a hero, Mao had caused the Cultural Revolution, killed millions and held back the Chinese for more than 50 years, showing as proof the developments of the last 30 years. I politely disagreed citing the education system and health system created by the Communist Party during those years, which in my opinion are at least partly responsible for the developments of the post-Mao era. He had none of it and simply said that I did not understand because I had not experienced and nor had my family experienced the evils of the Mao era. Following this conversation were other discussions on politics, culture and all that, his opinion was often that China and its people lacked education and morals and that this was directly linked to the Cultural Revolution.

A Shanghai/Beijing student sitting next to him seemed to be in agreement with what he said for most of the time. He was of this post 80s generation, people my age, who have not seen the days of Mao and hardcore communism. People like him are much more open to western ideas and ways of doing, especially in big cities. According to the Shanghai friend, Shanghai is the city that is the most open to western ideas and so foreigners come to the city where they feel "like fish in water". Spending a few days in Beijing afterwards, I can definitely agree that architecturally speaking, Beijing is much more Chinese, but Shanghai is not western, it has more of that Asian metropolis feel that also exists in Hong Kong.        

A last character that made the train ride interesting was a thirty year old Northerner from the city of Harbin. He spoke with a nice northern accent which has heavier Rs and is usually louder. He spoke of wine and women, as well as money. He read everyone's hand using techniques of Chinese medicine. He told me I have low blood pressure and a bad stomach. This was definitely true at the time since I had a stomach ache caused by sitting on the train for too long. He was a lovable and funny man and I enjoyed that reading hands felt very much like a hand massage. Who could not enjoy someone who massages everyone else hands. He was also a positivist. While the Shanghai coin trader (that was his profession, at least on his business card) was railing away at the government and the backwardness of the Chinese people, my northern friend was saying that Chinese people are not that bad and making jokes. A very nice counterweight to a negative but needed viewpoint.  

I arrived in Beijing and rode a cab to see family..

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