For those with a sense of adventure, travel by train can provide the most spectacular way to see the landscape in China. Sure, booking a flight may be the easiest option, but it’s inevitably more expensive and you miss seeing the diverse landscape of this truly beautiful country. Looking out the window of a train in China can remind you how remarkable the scenery really is outside of the big cites.

For starters, looking through the glass of a speeding train out onto China is different from other countries. From cascading green rice paddies with water buffalo to karsts rising out of lush meadows with encompassing rivers and little farms as far as the eye can see, watching China’s landscape geography change before your eyes is truly a wonder.

You look around and see people sitting around the aisles everywhere playing cards, eating, or sleeping. In China, whatever you do on the train, the first thing you must learn is that there are 3 essential items for train travel: instant noodles, sunflower seeds and oranges, which must be consumed liberally at all times.

While train travel in China does have its moments of true bliss and a real appreciation for the country, there are numerous odd experiences and adventures that come along with Chinese train travel for several reasons.  First, distance and delays are an obvious issue. Secondly, if you are a foreigner you are bound to draw attention to yourself whether you like it or not and thirdly, whether you are on a night bus in London, riding a night bus in Mexico, or taking the New York subway, you will inevitably meet various questionable characters in China as well.

Short distances of desperation:
My friend lived in Yiwu, China and I was living in Zhuji China. According to the timetable at the station,  this represents a journey of roughly 20 minutes by train and the train came every two hours or so. However, the unfortunate truth is that just because the timetable indicates that frequency by no means implies that the train will actually arrive. Many evenings I left the station at 6:30, cursing the inconvenience because I had waited three hours only to find out the train wouldn’t come until 8pm. The monitor spins and clicks like a roulette while you stare, pleading that it only delays the train by 20 minutes. But no, every 30 minutes or so you are given the false hope that your train will only be delayed another 30 minutes and you reach your destination 4 hours later.

On display in a small town:
There are no other foreigners in a small town Chinese train station waiting room much less on the train itself. Short waiting periods can be fascinating; because train stations are a great place to people watch even if you are on display for the sheer amusement of the Chinese populous. The rooms are massive with high ceilings and rows of seats along with several hundred curious Chinese people…and you. In the rural areas of China, the farmers carry their produce onto the train to take to the next city, so it isn’t uncommon to be seated next to a lady with a 50 K bushel of celery or recycling, or even a dead chicken in a basket.

The sight of a foreigner in these small rural cities is quite amusing for people in these areas, who have never seen a “real, live” foreigner on their streets or occupying a seat in their train stations. On one occasion in Zhuji, I stood against a wall waiting for my train to be announced so I could queue. The people in the room straightened up to get a good look at me and started to whisper to each other. The joker of the room happened to be the meal cart vendor, who took it upon himself to saunter up to me with his cart and ask in Chinese where I was going. Everyone was impressed by his fearlessness and waited in anticipation. I mumbled that I was going to Yiwu to visit a friend. The whole room seemed to think either that my Chinese was hysterical or it was hysterical that I answered in Chinese and they let out a roar. The people in close proximity decided to inch closer to investigate the apparent amazing and once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the “foreign girl talking to the food vendor.” Around twenty of them got up and came over. Feeling a bit surrounded and humiliated I decided to text someone immediately to distract myself and tried to look very busy hoping that this would ward of the “onlookers.”  But nope! This was even more interesting, and five guys came over to see exactly what I was texting and were shocked to realize that No! It was NOT Chinese that I was texting in! They marveled and commented to each other openly, asking me what it was. “English” I replied.  “Woo!” I texted everyone I knew in about 30 minutes until luckily they lost interest finally and my train was only delayed 4 more times and I got to Yiwu safe and sound for a few hours.

 

Seed Shards and Chicken Legs: A Lesson in Dining Etiquette
Encountering strange characters while traveling in any country is commonplace and China is no exception. I have met some funny, crude, and downright disturbing characters on various train excursions mostly on the Shanghai to Zhuji train, a seemingly harmless four-hour ride where all the crazy people go apparently. One of the oddest moments and worst example of civilized dining etiquette I have yet witnessed was in a hard seat area of the train.

As I sat down at my window seat, I was relieved to see that there were only 2 more people sitting with me. The seats are such that there are 3 seats on each side facing each other for a total of 6 with a little table in the middle. The passengers in front of me were a middle-aged couple with a gigantic drawstring bag full of dirty carrots. On the little table lay a small metal tray for putting the sunflower seed remnants or the orange peels. Feeling the train ride was lacking something, the couple extracted a large brown paper bag of sunflower seeds and began to eat. The woman's husband spat his seed shells into the tray gingerly because the floor was clean at this point and free of spit or seeds.

Oblivious to his cue, the lady munched on her seeds and spat them right out onto the floor. Yes, this is common on trains, but it was the sheer voracity for which she ground the seed up in her mouth like a baby does with its first solid cheerio, sifted them through her teeth while pushing the seeds up to the front of her mouth with a grinding nllmmahhh whistling sound which left me awestruck. The seed shells clung to her lip and flapped while she tried to breath hard enough to unstick them. The seeds fluttered on her lower lip and she leaned forward to spit them onto what ended up being mostly me and secondly the floor. There I sat blinking and wincing ridiculously for a good 45 minutes, dodging shards of seed remnants, which stuck to my shirt, pants, and shoes.

Having finished snacking, she removed a cold vacuum wrapped chicken leg from her purse. She dug it out, tearing through the cellophane wrapper with her teeth, and began to ravage the precooked leg. After chomping off all the meat she proceeded to crush the entire bone with her obviously iron jaws. But that was only for starters, she was set on reaching the marrow at the center so she slurped this piece of mangled bone dry! I was both mildly disturbed and impressed as she sucked every possible module of marrow out and then gnawed and crunched the bone in its entirety. What was left of the original piece of chicken was about a centimeter of cartilage. I never knew human teeth were capable of such carnivorous destruction.

Even after being spat at with seeds or having someone’s stinky silky socked feet next to me for four hours, I still love train rides in China. After all these experiences, I admit that at times Chinese train travel is neither enjoyable nor convenient. Many times we have a romantic notion of what it can be; we can picture ourselves gazing bright eyed out the window of the train while writing in a leather bound journal, listening to music that inspires, making us feel alive. Other times we walk into a train station bathroom and someone is gutting a freshly killed chicken in the bathroom sink and we wonder how we got here. Far away from the city smog, buildings and cars honking, and the endless cycles of traffic and overtime, we forget that we still need to travel and take the opportunity to see the country, even if we do live here.  We are here, after all, to experience China to the fullest, and the adventure of riding trains here is all part of it.

(Article originally posted on Jan 14th of 2009.)

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