The intricate dance of sitting on the bus

Sorry it's been so long since I've written, but China has blocked access to Blogger so I must go through a proxy server to do this.

Anyhoo, I was riding the bus the other day and I never fail to be amused by the dance Chinese people do when there aren't enough seats on the bus. Let me explain. So a person is sitting down on the bus where there are no longer any seats. One of her friends gets on and she notices. She waves her friend over and stands up, motioning the friend to sit down. The friend laughs and pushes the person to try and get her to sit back down, to which the person responds by laughing and also trying to push the friend into the seat. This goes on for several minutes until the friend finally agrees to sit down. Once she's in the seat, it is now her responsibility to hold all purses and bags of the person standing. It's really quite amusing. The dance gets especially fierce when there is no obvious seniority issue because each person wants to honor the other person. Oh Chinese and their funny traditions.

A few weeks ago I went to Pingyao and Datong for a long weekend. Pingyao is this ancient city SW of The Shizz. It was originally going to be turned into an industrial town, but all of the industry left, leaving Pingyao virtually untouched. The way I did this trip was I took an overnight train from Chengde to the Shizz, thinking I could get a D-train to Pingyao. Unfortunately all of the seats on the D-train were full, so I wound up staying the night in the Shizz and taking the early morning (5:30 am) train standing room only to Pingyao. It was fun to stay in the Shizz with Paul and Sam again, but the 4 am wake up call was not fun. So I got on the train and I hijacked some boy's seat and we sat four abreast in a three person seat. Nobody wanted to kick me out. So I arrived in Pingyao without too much ado, and wound up meeting this really nice Chinese girl when I got off the train who helped me get into the old part of the city. It is truly beautiful there. When you think about old-school China, Pingyao is the place you think of, with all the old hutongs and temples. You halfway expect Lin Daiyu or Jia Baoyu to walk out of one of those buildings. Anyways, I spent two days there wandering around, looking at temples and buying crap I didn't need. I hung out with two English people, Ben and Charlotte, who weren't travelling together, they just hung out together. We wound up biking the 6K out to this temple that was outside the city, kind of cool.

From Pingyao I went to Datong to see the hanging temples and the grottoes. The only problem was that I got into Datong at 4 in the morning, long before anything opens and I wasn't planning on staying the night, so no hoste/hotel to sit in. Luckily, some policemen took pity on me and let me sit in their office until the CITS tour office opened. Once CITS opened, I found out the only tour they had that did both the grottoes and the hanging temples ended at 6, and my train left (I thought) at 4. So I wound up renting a taxi for the day for 200 kuai. First we went to McDonalds to get breakfast cuz I was super hungry. Then we went to the Hanging Temples, and got there around 8:30, which was great because none of the tour groups had showed up yet. So I got tons of pictures with NO PEOPLE in them. It was awesome. At 9 all the tours started showing up so it got uber crowded and I decided to leave. Then we went to the grottoes, about a 2 hour drive. The grottoes were really cool as well. Basically some people decided to carve buddhas in these sandstone caves. There are thousands of carvings spread over about 40 caves. They range anywhere from inches tall to 30 meters in the largest of the caves. It's really pretty cool. Much to the amusement of other people, I was taking pictures of myself. So I'd set my camera down and run to where I wanted to have my picture taken. A lot of Chinese people got a good laugh over that.

So I finished seeing the grottoes and headed back to Datong city to catch my 4:00 train. Unfortunately, the lady at the train station booked me on the 2:00 train! I remember checking my ticket in the morning and seeing the "4" from 14:00, but in never struck me that it meant 2:00 for some reason. So I missed my train. And the most frustrating part was that I was actually back in time to take the train, I just didn't know it. So yeah, tons of headache getting back to Beijing to go home. All of the seats were full, I was going to have to take a 6 hour hard seat train to Beijing that arrived at West Station at 5 am. Then I would have to spend a lot of money to take a cab from West station to Central station when I was already running out of money. Many phone calls to Cecilia and tears of frustration later, I wound up paying a hundred yuan to take a four hour mini van ride back to Beijing. Then I got in so late that the subways were shutting down. I was supposed to stay with Zach at Red Lantern House, but it was so much farther to there than to Sanlitun that I just went to Sanlitun instead. Plus it was twice as expensive. So the last few hours kind of put a damper on my trip, but altogether it was fun.

Oh yeah, and I went to an English speaking Easter service in Beijing that was really nice. I met up with the Shizz kids in Beijing and then Paul and I went to the Easter service at this hotel somewhere. It kind of reminded me of one of those megachurches you see in the US. The hotel auditorium was filled to capacity with only foreigners (Chinese people are not allowed inside due to government regulations, you must have a foreign passport to get in), all waving their arms and singing. It was kind of fun and made me feel good. I felt very at home in this Easter service surrounded by foreigners. It's a difficult feeling to explain the feeling of familiarity I had.

And next week my parents arrive for their tour around China, and then two weeks after that Michelle arrives so we can start our big tour. Yay!