no sleep 'til beijing (part 2)

(Just to point out how extraordinarily marked-up the internet access is at our Marriott Courtyard hotel's "Business Center," right now I'm typing in an internet cafe that Maya and I just stumbled on. It's full of young, chain-smoking Chinese gamers busy shooting each other up online, and the internet access is 3 yuan per hour - only 20 times less than what it costs at the hotel! That said, blogger is being slow as fuck, which may or may not be the fault of the cafe. Anyway, I digress...)

Bad, very bad...actually, fucking disgusting: the 9-hour hard-sleeper train ride from Xi'an to Pingyao. If Maya had been pleasantly surprised at our first Chinese overnight train experience, now that her expectations had been raised, she was in for a horrible shock, as were Eveline and I. As we stumbled with the frantic mass of humanity making its way from the Xi'an train station to our 11:15pm train, breaking out the "moshpit elbows" technique we've perfected over the years (though the Chinese seem to have elevate it to a martial art and were honestly kicking our asses), we knew pretty much right away that we were in for a long, bumpy night. Through the train windows we could see that the bunks were made of exposed metal and the so-called beds were basically glorified benches. This was clearly, as Maya called it, a "ghetto train." Once we stepped inside, the story only got worse. We walked through the bathroom area, which was wet with puddles of fluids we could only guess at. There was a tiny metal sink in the corner and, across from it, the door to the toilet (more on that hellhole soon). Similarly, the rest of our car - the bunks, walls, floors, everything - was filthy, rusty, and made either of metal or something equally hard and forbidding. Basically, it looked like someone had uprooted a decrepit old prison or insane asylum and slapped it on wheels. Maya, who sat in her bunk trying to touch as little as possible, noticed with the rest of us that the blankets, far from the plushy comforters of our last ride, were just raggedy old towels (which especially sucked since the train was freezing cold). She sat there, and basically flipped the fuck out. Eveline and I both deal with stress internally, with a quiet, grit-your-teeth-and-take-it attitude; not Maya. "I can't ride this train," she said over and over. "Maybe we can go back to Fish's hotel and book a plane back to Beijing. I don't give a fuck about Pingyao. This is nauseating." The poor Chinese man who was sharing our bunk area slunk back into the corner, clearly uncomfortable watching his strange white female bunkmate lose her shit. Eventually Eveline and I managed to calm Maya down a little, and since the train had started moving, she (and we) really had no choice but to man the fuck up and make it through the night somehow.

Even more fucking disgusting: the toilet on this train. At some point, Eveline decided that the best way for her to deal with our situation was to try and sleep it out; before attempting slumber, she paid a visit to the bathroom. When she came back, she looked traumatized. "Bad, huh?" Maya asked (by now she'd moved on from flipping the fuck out to shaking her head and chuckling at the horror of it all). "Yeah," was all Eveline could manage before climbing up to her bed, sticking in her earplugs, putting on her sleeping mask, and pulling her raggedy old towel up over her. A few minutes later Maya's bladder compelled her to pay her own visit. She came back, with a mirthless grin on her face. "That might be the most disgusting bathroom I have ever seen," she said to me. "Though it doesn't smell at all for some weird reason," she added. "You really have to go see it for yourself." My morbid curiosity fully aroused, I got up, strode back to the bathroom area, opened the door, and took a peek. What I saw was basically the nightmarish, shit-splattered bathroom from the film Trainspotting - if the movie had been remade in Chinese and featured an Asian squat toilet.

A brief digression on squat toilets: If you've never seen one of these fuckers, consider yourself lucky, and then imagine a shallow rectangular pit in the floor with a drain at one end, where waste get's flushed away. Sometimes there's some tread on either side of this pit where you're supposed to place your feet. Basically you squat over the whole thing and do your business. Now as a dude, pissing into a squat toilet is no big deal - it's like a big urinal. Shitting is another matter. The first and last time I took a shit in a squatting position, I was out camping for a week Freshmen year of college. I walked into the woods, dug a hole in the ground, pulled my pants down around my ankles, squatted - and proceeded to piss all over the back of my pants. Needlessly to say, I have yet to use a squat toilet here in Asia, and I certainly wasn't going to start with this particularly grostesque model in a moving train. So I squeezed my sphincter tight and prayed for a constipated night. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming already in progress...

Strangely good: staying up that night with Maya. Unlike Eveline, Maya and I knew that sleep wasn't in our immediate future, so we pulled down two seats next to a window, watched the strange rain-swept darkness outside whiz by, and talked 'til the early morning. Between hanging out with Fish and Eveline, crashing with Fish in his various luxury hotel rooms, and riding overnight trains, we hadn't been alone together for a long time it seemed, so it was cool to finally get some time to talk for real, just the two of us...even though we were hardly by ourselves, but rather surrounded by snoring Chinese. We talked about how, in some ways, as disgusting as the train was, this was just what we had signed up for when we embarked on this whole 4-month trip - experiences that were truly foreign, that truly took us out of our comfort zone, that we would not and could not find at home. We talked about how much stronger we would be after this trip, and after this train ride, in fact. And as we peered out our window, we saw rising out of the blackness, a bizarre factory/town filled, for whatever reason, with green lights that cast the whole smoke-filled sky around it in an eerie green. Maya commented that it looked almost like the aurora borealis... or, I thought, like the aftermath of a nuclear winter. Either way, it was a surreal - and truly foreign - image. Eventually, we crept into our bunks and into a fitful sleep, and when morning finally came, and we pulled into Pingyao station, we felt deep inside us that it really was a brand new day.

Totally crazy and awesome: the auto-rickshaw ride from the Pingyao train station to our hotel. Take the front half of a motorcycle, solder a bunch of seats and two wheels behind it, and then bend some pipes into a frame around the whole thing and throw a dirty plastic tarp over it all - that should give you an idea of the vehicle that took us, bumping and splashing, through the slick, rainy, and narrow-as-fuck streets of Pingyao.



Also totally crazy and awesome: our hotel, called Yi De. Basically, the whole place was as gorgeous as many of the shrines and courtyard houses that we had visited as sightseeing locations, but we got to stay there. And though the architecture was ancient and traditional, the actual accomodations were modern, comfortable, and, most importantly, for me, did not include any squat toilets. Here are Eveline and Maya in front of the portal (the thing locked with a huge padlock) to the cozy room that the three of us shared.

Beautiful but sopping wet and shiver-inducingly cold: Pingyao. The inclement weather didn't stop us from exploring. We climbed up and around the city wall...


explored the old-district streets, walked through a martial-arts museum full of the most insane antique weaponry you could imagine, and visited the mansion where the movie Raise the Red Lantern was shot.

What was striking (other than the singular ancient beauty of the city) was the obvious poverty. Pingyao originally remained so preserved simply because it was too poor to advance; only later did it become apparent that being trapped in time could be a tourist draw. From atop of the city wall, we saw buildings where people were still living that had shattered roofs and walls, roofs with trees growing right through them, roofs made of twisting, uncarved tree limbs. What was stunning was not just the ancientness of the town but the fact that people, modern people not unlike ourselves, were living their "normal" lives (watching TV, driving cars, wearing western-style clothes) in conditions that seemed medieval to us.

Bizarre but warming: coke and ginger tea. We stopped into a cafe to take a break from the bone-chilling rain, and Maya and I got ginger tea and lemon tea, respectively. Eveline got coke and ginger tea - coke apparently has become a staple of nu Chinese cousine (Eveline says that she's even heard of coke chicken, where the cola is used as a sweet glaze). What she got was a cup of hot, no-longer-bubbly coke (and, yes, ginger) that wasn't disgusting but pretty fucking weird.

Delicious and ridiculously cheap, yet with a price: the restaurant in Pingyao where we had both lunch and dinner. The place was packed with locals, which is always a good sign, so we went inside around lunch time after settling in at Yi De. Everyone stared at us as we walked in, and the staff, which was all junior-high or high-school aged girls, led us to a private room in the back. We ordered the most incredibly scrumptious comfort food, most of which was hardly what you think of as chinese food - stewed beef (which tasted very much like pork) and potatoes, sauteed green veggies, and some delicate noodle soup with this pasta called Cat Ears (for its visual resemblance to, uh, cat ears) in it, as well as some fresh parsley and little pieces of tomato. As we finished our meal (which costs about 40 yuan or a little over $5 total!), we heard loud bangs coming from outside and we discovered that a shitload of firecrackers were going off right on the street by the restaurant - turns out that the reason the place was so packed was because there was wedding party going down. When we returned there for dinner (the food was that delicious), the party was still raging, only the people were clearly way drunker (as custom goes, the bride and groom have to do shots of this insane 60-proof Chinese alcohol with every member of the party, and there were a lot). Almost as soon as I finished dinner, I felt my stomach churning, and by the time we got back to our hotel room, I had the full-on runs, which was particularly embarassing since the bathroom walls were thin (but thank god we had a western-style toilet). The next day I was feeling only marginally better (after popping 6 or so Pepto Bismol tablets) and Maya had followed in my unfortunate example (Eveline, however, apparently gastronomically hardened by her year in China, was no worse for wear). Our digestive systems bubbling and broiling, Maya and I were especially nervous about the forthcoming 11-hour overnight hard-sleeper ride back to Beijing. The staff at Yi De had assured us that while the train from Xi'an-to-Pingyao was, it turned out, notoriously gritty (a train for coal miners, basically), the train to Beijing was much, much better. Still, we couldn't help but be trebidatious...

Not bad at all: the train back to Beijing on Saturday night. As soon as we were close enough outside the train to see the bunk set-up, we knew we would be alright - Maya and Eveline immediately recognized the nice plush comforters from our first train, not the raggedy old towels from our second. Though not as cushy and lux as that first ride, and though it was jammed with passengers (the national Chinese holiday week was about to kick off and all sorts of folks from outlying areas were coming to Beijing for vacation), this train proved to be plenty clean and comfortable. We ended talking to this totally awesome Chinese family (a father, mother, and 14-year-old daughter who spoke surprising good English and was just about the sweetest little Asian teenager ever) sharing Eveline's bunk area. The dad offered me a shot of that crazy 60-proof Chinese alcohol (he had already polished off about a 3rd of the bottle), which I accepted, hoping that it would kill whatever bacteria was plaguing my gut. The shit wasn't bad and it warmed me right up (the dad told Eveline that, this being my first time trying the liquor, I should take 3 shots, but I declined that). Maya also took a swig, as did Audrey, the nearly 6-foot-tall redheaded girl from Seattle we befriended while waiting for the train in the station. Needlessly to say, she deflected a lot of the stares from us, though eventually Maya and Eveline goaded me into showing off my stretched ears and my tattoos to the Chinese family, which made me once again the center of attention. ("Don't you love that Brandon is like a walking freakshow here?" Maya grinned.) Maya talked to the 14-year-old daughter for a while, about her school, her family, etc. and they seemed to hit it off (in fact, Maya had such a great time talking to everyone that she not only had a good night's sleep when she finally took to her bunk, but her stomach was mysteriously - though temporarily - cured). The next morning as we disembarked and went off in search of a taxi, Eveline said that since meeting us, that girl would probably practice her English 20-times harder now.

So, ultimately, what did we take away from our little trip to Xi'an and Pingyao? Well, we came away with a new friend, for one: Audrey, who just left to return to the States today (Wednesday). (We might have left with another, as I had encouraged Maya to give the daughter of that Chinese family her email address, but Maya can get weirdly shy sometimes. I always feel like her sociability and skill at just shooting the shit and connecting with random people is her greatest talent - one that I'm pretty jealous of - but she sometimes doesn't take full advantage of it.) Eveline, personally, also came away with a new appreciation of Beijing; Maya, with a truer understanding that, as she put it, "things can always be worse"; and me, well, I'm even more dedicated than ever to staying as far away as possible from those squat toilets.