China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day

I’m going to post a few things about my recent trip to China. See also Sayaka’s recent postings on our trip. July 23rd, 2004: I’ll post this next time I have a net connection. I’m currently in Qingdao (pictures here), a coastal city in China’s Shandong province. Getting here was a thirty-four hour adventure that began in Takarazuka, Japan.

We left Sayaka’s home for an early morning rush hour train to Osaka. From there we took the bullet train to Tokyo and then the Narita airport express train.

Our afternoon flight to Beijing was on the very reasonably priced Iran Air which, because I have never been to Israel, even someone traveling on an American passport can ride. The flight was about three hours on an older 747 model plane. My seat was broken so it slowly went into reclined position as you leaned back. This was only problematic on take off and landing though. The food was great, some cute little potatoes and a stew like sauce over beef. It reminded me of Turkish food.

We took a taxi from Beijing straight to the train station and stood in line with a few thousand people to get train tickets to Qingdao. The 22:00 faster overnight train we wanted was sold out (except for “standing tickets” or 站票) we managed to get some “hard bed” (硬卧) tickets for a later and slower overnight train leaving at 01:47. That left us with a few hours to kill. We went to see the new Zhang Yimou movie somewhere near Wang Fujin (I wasn’t impressed). It was my first experience in a Chinese movie theater, though I had lived in China twice before. I don’t plan on repeating the experience any time soon. Besides the constant ringing of cellphones, business conducted on cellphones in loud voices, and being surrounded by people discussing the movie in normal voices, the movie also frequently lost its sound and on two occasions suddenly played sound from some other movie.

(Continued this Posting Aug 1st, 2004) We caught our early morning train, which was a long 15 hour trip to Qingdao (less than 200 RMB if I remember correctly). I came away from the experience with fewer negative memories than the long train ride I made in 2000 from Nanjing to Bejing with nothing but a “standing ticket” We managed to get a few hours of sleep. However, there was a really annoying woman whose loud voice and sharp Beijing dialect (no, people in Beijing do not speak “standard” Chinese) was a constant obstacle to our rest during the trip. She also frequently turned on the loudspeaker, which intermittently blasted Chinese folk music, government censored news (at 6am in the morning), and pop music at a really loud volume. Luckily there was another man who wanted a little sleep so we teamed up with him to turn off the speakers (after I finally realized that was what he was doing).

The countryside of Shandong that we passed was mostly farmland, small rural villages, and the occasional massive factory in the middle of the field. The village walls often had government propaganda phrases written all over them, including the very revealing plea to everyone that 生男生女都一样 (Give birth to a boy, or a girl—it makes no difference) .

Ultimately, our first full day in China, which was to be spent sightseeing in Qingdao, ended up being spent mostly on a train. Sayaka read Doraemon in Chinese and some Taiwanese literary book while I enjoyed a great book on Multiethnic Japan in my own native English.

After checking into our hotel in Qingdao we soon discovered there were no seats or beds on trains going back to Beijing for several days, essentially trapping us in the city. We were told there was no bus and thus ended up dishing out more money for a plane ticket back to Beijing. Later, a taxi driver we hired to take us around for sightseeing throughout the day (he was great fun and a smart guy by the way if anyone else wants to hire him, his name is 王振全 and you can reach him on his mobile when you arrive at 13070881219) told us there was a 10 hour bus to Beijing for a really cheap price (cheaper and faster than our 15 hour train ride…)

Overall, Qingdao was quite a nice coastal resort city, although it was very smoggy (it has a population of close to 7 million people, which is larger than many European countries, including Norway). I especially enjoyed the old German quarter (Germany used to control Shandong under a lease until Japan, as a member of the allies in World War I, took over). You can see a few of my pictures from Qingdao here.