Another Trans-Oceanic Post

So We haven’t posted in a really long time. The real problem is that living in China takes up enough time that it becomes difficult to take the time to write about living in China. However it is time to put in the saga of the Spring Festival Travel Debacle!

Part 1: Yes we have No Trains.

Our original plan was to spend much of our 6 week holiday traveling to various places in China by train. We wanted to travel in China because well there’s a lot of it and we wanted to see some while we were here. We wanted to travel by train because 1. Trains are cool, and 2. Trains are relatively cheap. Keep in mind that we developed this plan with the advice of our Program Coordinator who has lived in China mostly for the past five years.

It turns out that over the Spring Festival Holiday (which is in fact in the middle of winter, don’t interrupt) you cannot get train tickets. You see, the tickets are available to students before they become available to the general population and since Spring Festival is the biggest travel period in China, by the time the tickets would be released to the general public they are already gone. This is aggravated by the fact that we are talking about physical tickets not a computerized system, so there may be that ticket you want somewhere, but you are unlikely to find it.

We found this all out the hard way of course with Meredith and our Program Coordinator James, trying on multiple days to find tickets for multiple routes with a perfect batting average of .000.

Part 2: The Journey To Changsha

This is actually the least eventful chapter in the Saga but must be included for posterity.

Our flight did not leave from Shenzhen but from the nearby city of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province. We got there via a bus that goes directly to the Guangzhou airport.

At first it seemed normal for a charter bus in China, with something innocuous on the TV screens. But about an hour and a half into the three hour ride it took a turn for the bizarre. The screens started showing weird sexual stuff. Not mind you explicitly pornographic material, but girls gyrating around, sometimes even around poles, in skimpy-outfits.

Now the nature of the content would have made it very strange already in the setting of a bus to the airport, but there was plenty of weird in the contents themselves. After all the one scantily clad male in the video was carrying a bicycle above his head. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried. We’re still trying to figure out how anyone did make this up. Somewhere someone thought it would be sexy for a man in a speedo to dance holding a bicycle over his head. The mind Boggles.

Once we got to the Guangzhou airport things were more or less like you would expect. No doubt this is so we’d be put off our guard for when we entered Changsha.