Last Train to Nanjing
Tomb Sweeping Day is a festival where people honor their dead ancestors by going shopping and visiting nearby attractions. I had a three-day weekend due to this celebration, but I’ve reached a point where the things I still want to see are too far away to do (or at least do comfortably) in just three days. Plus, since my Harbin trip, I’ve had no enthusiasm for traveling alone.
Fortunately, I know this girl (who you could call my girlfriend) who makes for a great travel buddy. Unfortunately, she runs a busy schedule down at the sweatshop training school and doesn’t have a lot of free time. I guess that’s the biggest problem with foreigner teachers trying to have local friends and local friends with benefits. Foreign teachers have so much time to kill while their Chinese friends work nine hours six days a week.
I wasn’t going to spend my three days watching TV, despite how much you guys love the TV roundups, so Sarah and I headed to Nanjing on Sunday. I should have realized trying to do Nanjing in one day was a bad idea, considering my ILP group tried the very same thing in 2005, and all we were able to see was this obstacle course with hilariously dangerous safety nets. Warning, old photo:
It took me half the day to realize we had gone to the same mountainous scenic area I was at four years ago. Everything about my ILP experience is such a haze now. But rather than attempt the obstacle course in a body four years older, we checked out Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum and the Linggu pagoda:
And then it was already time to go. We took a different bus back into the city, knowing it didn’t go to the train station but thinking it would, at the very least, take us to a good transfer point. It didn’t. We hopped in a taxi at 6:25 and told the driver to go to the train station. He asked when our train left. 6:58. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it was clear he was dumbfounded that we were so far away yet expected to get there in 30 minutes. In fact, he didn’t even take us. He said we’d have better luck with the subway. We didn’t.
I’d like to think we would have made it had we not gotten stuck at the subway’s exit gate. Their stupid token system picked the worst possible time to start rejecting random people. The guard wouldn’t let us duck under the gate, either. We had to go wait in the line of shame and be let through manually. By the time we got to our train’s terminal, it was 7:01. Of course, the only thing you can count on in China just happens to be that the trains always leave on time. Damn it, damn it, damn it! We had to pocket a 40-yuan train ticket and wait five hours so we could take the next available train back to Changzhou at 12:30 at night.
Man, you get tired of standing in these lines:
I didn’t arrive at my school until 3:00 in the morning. There’s supposed to be a guard stationed at the front at all times, but it was so late, he had already called it a day, turned off the lights in the guard house, and built a little bed on the floor. The sound of a taxi pulling up and the door slamming wasn’t enough to wake him. I decided to let him be and found a nice, dark, quiet place where I could climb over the fence. It was so easy for me to get in, it makes me wonder how secure these places really are.
This little “adventure” has also brought to light how much I hate traveling at the whim of public transportation. I am getting particularly annoyed with the train system in China. When I was preparing to go to Harbin, I went to the train station seven days ahead of time to buy my ticket. They said I could only buy tickets five days in advance. I came back two days later, and the train I wanted was sold out.
The five-day rule is enormously inconvenient, as is being required to buy your tickets in person. For those who want to leave a city the same day they arrive, there’s a good chance the only option left is a standing ticket, which is also very, very inconvenient. But there are so many people all trying to ride the train at the same time, allowing people to reserve seats in advance, over the phone or online, would probably mean you won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
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