Chris and I have been trying, for the past two weeks, to take a little trip somewhere. Just for fun. Just to get away from cold and dusty Anyang and explore more of this country.
So. We picked a small city named Kaifeng that’s close to Anyang- less than a couple hours by super fast train, or four hours by slow, stinky bus. Perfect for a weekend. Many of our students are also from Kaifeng, or they’ve at least been there, and they assure us “it is a very beautiful and ancient city. Famous food in Kaifeng. You will like it.” Sold!
But now we must get down to the practicalities of actually going to Kaifeng. The journey. I enjoy the destination more so than the journey (hard, uncomfortable overnight trains, sleeping outside on a ferry, turbulent plane rides) but never more so than right now. The Chinese don’t do “practicality” at all. At least my organized, planner’s brain does not function within the Chinese system.
I, like I mistakenly assumed everyone did, bought my train, plane and bus tickets online nowadays. Easy peasy. All the info is online, and you avoid the smelly lines and rude people on their cell phones. But you can’t do this in China for a little jaunt to Kaifeng. (For bigger trips between major cities I found it is possible). So Chris and I would have to conqueror the ticket people at the train station before going anywhere.
Before even getting to that part, we discovered there is no direct train route from Anyang to Kaifeng. We have to stop in another city, Zhengzhou, the crowded nexus of pretty much all the damn train lines in China, and transfer to the bus. There are four bus stations. Which one will we need? No one can give us a clear answer on that. It’s a kinda wait and see thing- and it looks like we’ll have to buy the tickets once we get to Zhengzhou (not before) and hope we can get seats.
I sighed and gritted me teeth. Fine. I’m a worldly woman, an experienced traveler, and I am capable of handling myself en route. We could figure this out.
Enter: Anyang’s train station.
Six or ten long lines stood in a surprisingly orderly fashion waiting to by tickets- what we hoped were train tickets because the train and bus stations in Anyang are next to each other and weren’t entirely sure where we were. I said “let’s do this” anyway. I felt confident that, with our small Chinese vocabulary at hand (we now know the words for “day” and “time”) we could make the ticket person understand us.
Then I looked around. I wanted to check what time the trains are. And surrounding us, on two high, blue walls, and other signs corralling the lines were lots and lots and lots of doodles.
I realized then that I had actually expected there to be letters. Not English, as the Chinese have beaten that hope out of me, but at least pinyin. Letters. I like letters. My brain can make sense of letters. Even if I don’t know the meaning of the word, I at least have a hope of figuring it out with my nifty Chinese-English dictionary. And if I can’t, c’est la vie.
But no, no, no. Here are these pictures instead, which in no obvious way relate to the thing/action/sound they describe. Pictures. How can you look up the meaning of the picture?
The room closed in on me. Brain rattling. The doodles danced around my paralyzed body taunting and hissing at me. All the while, the Chinese people around me knew, they knew not only what these signs said (which I presume were the train time tables, but who knows) but how this whole crazy system worked. AND I had to go to the bathroom.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Chris, who nodded and we quickly ducked out of the stuffy station and scurried past the groups of people waving doodle signs at us.
This was a serious blow to my pride- we needed help. With our paltry Chinese we couldn’t do this by ourselves. Ask about train times, ask for a round trip ticket, ask for “soft seat” instead of “hard seat.” Ask about buses to Kaifeng… to do this on our own, without the guides our Chinese colleagues insist that we need, we’ll need someone to write down the Chinese characters of important phrases we’ll need to know- “Which was to the bus to Kaifeng?”
Oy. This shouldn’t be the complicated, should it? A week after the trip to the train station and we’re still trying to figure out amidst conflicting information (how are we supposed to get anywhere if the Chinese who supposedly know can’t agree). I have no idea if we’ll make it or not.
