Anyways, I made it safely into Shanghai today from Jingdezhen. At the end of my trip I chose my route very poorly, and my pride at being a master of Chinese travel has been humbled a bit. Like Longyan, Jingdezhen is a bit off the beaten train track, and train connections are a bit of a pain. If I had to do it over again, I think that I would have started biking in Fuzhou (or maybe Xiamen), and kept my luggage there, and then visited a city like Suzhou, Shaoxing, or maybe Ningbo just prior to leaving Shanghai. Oh well - I'm learning.
The reason why Jingdezhen was such a poor decision was because 1) I really don't think that the Jingdezhen porcelein is all that cool. 2) you can buy it anywhere in China anyways. and 3) The only train option to Shanghai really sucked.
By really sucked, I really mean it - still, it was not the worst train trip I have ever taken in China. The worst was Jinan to Benxi three years ago on a PACKED train with no-seat tickets. That was brutal. At the very least, I had a hard seat ticket on this train, so I didn't have to try to sleep on the floor of the train (which if any of you out there have been on a Chinese train, know what a disgusting experience that can be - I laid down newspapers when I tried it, but the filth still crept through....). However, this was a bit of an annoying train trip largely because of the large number of young children on the train.
Don't get me wrong - I love kids, and I am usually pretty patient with them on planes and such. Just on a packed Chinese train, the problems that kids have become magnified a hundredfold - I think my description will help explain this. Anyways, there were a few reasons why there were so many kids on the train - first, school had just gotten out. Second, this was a slow train with no air-conditioning - the cheapest kind of tickets that are possible to procure in China (my ticket to Shanghai from Jingdezhen was 55 yuan or about 8 dollars- it was probably around 700km) - this attracts the poorest segment of China's population that run the rails - the migrant laborers. Third, this train went from a region in China where a lot of migrant workers come from to a region where a lot of them live (the Yangtze River Delta). Finally, many migrant workers leave their children at home with their grandparents while they go off and work. It's kind of a sad arrangement because the parents might not even see their own children for months or in extreme cases, years. Anyways, so this was a train full of kids being hauled off by their grandparents to visit their parents in the rich east. The kid who was seated directly beside me was going to visit his parents near Shanghai - the first time he had seen them in over a year (the boy is 9 years old).
One child about 2 years old cried almost the whole way (remember, this was a night train), and the grandmother's response (as it was in the bus I took from Huangguoshu) was to yell at the kid, which, of course, made the cries get even worse. Another disturbing fact is that Chinese people do not use diapers for their kids - they usually pay close attention, and when the kid needs to go, they put them on the toilet - or when they are outside, the kid just goes on the street. Or when they are on the train, and it is so packed full of people that you can't move through the aisles, the kid just poos on the ground. Another exciting bit of action was when the girl sitting kitty-corner across from me threw up on the ground. By some sort of lucky premonition, I had picked up my backpack from where she threw up only about 5 minutes previous, for which I was infinitely grateful. The puke was mostly water - as she hadn't actually eaten anything for most of the trip (she was probably starving, the poor girl!), so it wasn't as bad as you might think, but it still was pretty gross. Anywyas, by the end of the 18 hour trip, you can imagine what the floor was like - and what the smell was like as well. Also, in front of the bathroom, someone didn't make it in time - or something, because there was a large amount of diarhhea there - I don't know if that came from a kid or not.
I should point out that usually Chinese trains are gross, but nowhere near this bad, with excrement and puke aplenty - it was just because it was a PACKED train that parents were unable to deal with their children's issues. They might notice that their kid is about to pee or poo, but if they tried to get them to the bathroom, they would never make it in time, and the kid would end up peeing or pooing on SOMEBODY rather than the ground. Same thing with the poor girl who puked. The crying kid could probably have been handled differently. But really, it is just a not fun experience being on these trains. And because Jingdezhen is off the beaten train track, it is difficult/impossible to buy hard seats. I should have looked into the bus options - I bet they have a sleeper bus.
Anyways, I got about negative two hours of sleep by being on that train, so I've been a little cranky today. One guy tried to butt in line at the metro ticket line, and I flipped out at him - I regret it in retrospect, because I was kind of a jerk (he was a jerk back though.....so I'm partially justified, right? Probably not........he was trying to get in front of me, so I told him that the line started in the back, and he continued to stand there as if he couldn't hear me, so I started to insult him verbally by saying he was an idiot because he obviously couldn't understand Mandarin, as I had just told him that the line started in the back. That got a reaction, but it wasn't very nice of me) and the people here in Shanghai who keep trying to practise their English seem to be especially getting on my nerves, so I'll try to stay away from them as much as possible - for their own feelings as much as mine.......
A final shot along the Bund before heading home.
Anyways, so tomorrow, I'll see if I can pick up a few final souvenirs, but I am done! It will be good to get back where the air is clean and the kids have diapers.
1 comment:
That's a lot of poop.
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