a hard seat to tai'an

this weekend i went on a trip to Taishan, a mountain in Shandong province about seven hours from beijing. we left friday night, climbed the mountain on saturday, and came back sunday night. i went with my chinese roommate, and three guys from kalamazoo college who studied here in the fall. it was without a doubt the most frustrating, interesting, tiring, exciting, painful, and fun experience i've had in china so far.

chinese trains have four types of tickets: yingzuo, ruanzuo, yingwo, and ruanwo (hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper). the prices increase as the quality of the ticket increases. the ride to Tai'an, the city at the base of Taishan, is only about seven hours from beijing, so we got hard seat tickets for about eight dollars each.

the lunar (chinese) new year is on february eighth (i think). the holiday is, from what i can gather, a mixture of thanksgiving, christmas, new years, and the fourth of july (there is a particularly good quote about this in Full Metal Jacket, Tet being the veitnamese version of the lunar new year). In any event, the holiday travel rush started last week, so right now there are several hunder million chinese people trying to go home to spend the holiday with their families, and most of them travel by train. and the hard seat is the cheapest ticket. and we bought hard seat tickets.

needless to say, the train was ridiculous. the difference between hard and soft seat is not that one seat is hard (they're both padded), but that in the train stations continuously sell standing tickets. there already were people standed when we got on in beijing, we had to kick people out of our seats, and more got on at every stop. there were a lot of people. i ended up sitting next to across from three girls heading home from beijing and next to a soldier also going home. i talked with the girls only a little, they kept playing tapes of themselves signing pop songs, and was going to ask them if they were all sisters when i realized that was an extremely stupid question. so i just shut up after that.

in total i got about an hour and a half of sleep, i think, broken up into fifteen minute segments. the girls had this enormous bag on the floor between us, so i either had to prop my feet up on it or bend them back underneath the seat. at one point, these women came down the isle, squeezing between the people sitting or standing there, trying to sell dried chicken, a Shandong speciality. they tried to sell me some beer. i didn't buy any.

we got to Tai'an at 5:30 in the morning, when it was still dark, and after following my absent minded roommate around in a circle, we got in a cab and asked him to take us to an open restaurant. we went to a horrible fast food joint with the most disgusting dumplings i've ever had and i had a pretty good bowl of warm soy milk (doujiang, i think). we ditched that place once it got light out and went to mcdonald's (maidanglao) where we had coffee and used the extremely clean and nice bathrooms (quite the opposite of the states). there we waited for my roommate's friend, Hai Miao, who eventually went up the mountain with us (my roommate took off and went home, the lazy jerk).

christ i've written a lot already, and i haven't even started climbing the mountain yet. i guess i'll break this post up into two parts. oh, before i forget, just a little teaser for next time, usually you can only buy your return ticket at the station you are returning from, so when we got to Tai'an and went to get our tickets, we discovered that they only had standing tickets (buying a ticket like that at this time of year is like going to the airport and trying to buy a ticket on the day before thanksgiving). so we bought standing tickets for the seven hour train ride back.

below is another of the crazy chinese translations that i've seen. the word for "caution" is mistranslated as "anger." in any event, the stone described was nothing to get worked up about.

i hear that the pictures may be too big for the format of the blog, though firefox is handling it much better than internet explorer. let me know what's up and i'll size future pictures down if it helps. anyway, check back later this week for the rest of the story, including pictures.

your friend, BEN