Train tickets
My friend Mike is visiting from Seattle for the first half of the Spring Festival holiday and today, I purchased our tickets to Kunming. Well, actually, I went to the office that reserves tickets in advance, if you’re willing to pay an “exorbitant” mark-up, and handed over a down payment of 200 kuai for our hard-sleeper tickets to Kunming. In case you’re not familiar with the exchange rate, that’s a couple of pennies over $25 for the deposit. Last week at my last Chinese class with Robyn (a separate entry required to explain that one…), I procured the Chinese characters for the name of the ticket office and she told me the general location, as well as gave me a phone number. I did some planning for our trip this weekend and know that sleeper tickets can go fast, especially for the Spring Festival holiday, so I made my way into the very bleary conditions today and went in search of the ticket office. First, though, I called Robyn to see if she’d be willing to translate in case any problems arose, but she said she was busy. Then I tried calling the office ahead of time to see if anyone spoke English. Nope.
I was completely turned around when I came to the intersection Robyn told me to look out for and ended up walking up and down several sides of the street before finally walking into a Chinese Lottery storefront to ask for “pointing” directions. A woman didn’t even look up at me from the sheet of paper I held in front of her face, but went back to her computer screen and pointed towards the direction I had just come from. I continued on in the now-subsiding rain until I recognized two characters from the scrawl in my notebook. I stepped inside, after depositing my dripping umbrella at the “doorway” – several heavy strips of thick, yellowed plastic sheeting overlapping and gently swaying in the January bluster.
As soon as I stepped inside, a woman sitting behind a window recognized me as the foreigner who’d called only thirty minutes before and she motioned me over to her window. A younger man stood beside her and smiled kindly at me. She was all business. I had prepared a sheet of paper before setting out that had the Chinese characters for the kind of tickets I wanted to buy (one-way, hard sleeper tickets), the number (2), the date on which I wanted to travel (Feb. 4th), the time of day (between afternoon and evening), the city and province I wanted to arrive in (Kunming, Yunnan Province), and the fact that I DID NOT want bottom bunks, but either 2nd or 3rd level ones. At the top of this sheet of paper, I’d initially written this all out in English so that I made sure of including, in Chinese, every detail that could make the difference between an enjoyable train ride and an unpleasant one. We will, after all, be on the train for a very long time!
The woman waved excitedly at me for some information other than my startled and shy face. I handed her the sheet of paper and she scoffed at the English before even getting to the characters at the bottom of the sheet. The man standing next to her said, as if to confirm that she shouldn’t destroy the piece of paper immediately, “Kunming! Kunming! Ta yao qu Kunming!” The woman looked skeptically at my poorly written characters, but they were legible enough for her to get the proceedings rolling.
Granted, I’ve not had anyone read the receipt and confirm that I’ve reserved the right kind of tickets for the right day and time, but I think things went rather well. A lot better than I had expected. It’s so funny now to think of me putting off this trip the entire weekend, feeling that I’d either be laughed out of the office for a huge lack of language capability or that me not being able to speak would completely prevent me from achieving my goal of reserving the two tickets.
The sad, or at least maybe now-obvious part of this story is that I was ELATED when I left that office with a guarantee of receiving the tickets by the 26th of January and with a fixed price well within agreeable terms. It looks as if each of us will only have to pay $45 USD for our one-way trip to Kunming. I mean, I was ecstatic and proud and walking on air. Of course, my trip TO the office was a different story. It was as if I was afraid of my own shadow. Sometimes, I feel that this new shyness due to language deficiencies will have one of two negative effects on me when I return to America: either I will have become terribly shy (I KNOW! Can you IMAGINE!?!?!?!), or I will be so starved for the kind of attention and understanding of those that speak my language that I’ll be even MORE outspoken and talkative than before. (Second verse, same as the first: I KNOW! Can you IMAGINE!?!?!?!)
What gets me is that these little adventures are continually reminding me of my circumstances here and how fun it is to relish such small, seemingly insignificant victories.
And, in case anyone is interested in living vicariously during the month of February, the plan thus far has Mike and I traveling north from Kunming, up through one of the most beautiful and culturally varied provinces of China, until we reach the pinnacle of our adventure (literally and temporally): Tiger Leaping Gorge. More details to come as the planning gets more and more underway. Today was a huge step in the right direction, as procuring train tickets at this time of year can be very difficult. Although, a friend told me that the Chinese government had tried to reduce the strain at holiday times since the majority of the population is in flux and trains are the cheapest mode of transportation the country currently has to offer.
Mike leaves on the 18th of February which technically IS the Chinese New Year Holiday this year, so, I will be taking on another adventure for the second half of the month, which is, as yet to be determined.
And, one last bit of exciting news, my old roommate Bianca, who now lives in DC, has booked her ticket to visit me in May. We will meet up in Beijing, see the Great Wall, go find this hanging monastery (it’s hanging off of the side of a cliff, according to a friend), and will tour the Beijing clubbing nightlife! The fun never stops for me here in China!!!
