Leaving for Shanghai

We are back in Beijing and I will do my best to write up what all happened this weekend. Unfortunately I am sure I forgot small details that I wanted to include.

After packing our bags we took a cab to the Beijing train station. There were some issues with this because apparently there are several train stations and we did not know which one we had to go to. Eventually we figured it out and got there early. We did not know what the meal situation would be on the train so we went to the food court at the train station. Word of advice, never go to the food court at the Beijing train station. There were numerous vendors selling all kinds of noodles, dumplings, soups and such. I decided to get noodles and Alex decided to get dumplings. I tried to buy my own noodles and got sucked into some whirlwind bureaucracy. The woman started putting my noodles in a bowl and I took out my Y8 to pay her. She would not take my money and kept pointing and yelling. So I looked over and there was another stall on the other side of the room. After standing there and obviously not doing what the woman wanted me to do, she led me to the stall and told me to pay Y8 plus another Y3. I don't know what the 3 was for, but I just gave it to them because I had not way of arguing. After giving the woman at the new stall the money, she gave me a foodcard. I went back to the woman with the noodles, she put my card in and then motioned for me to go back to the other woman and she put her hands up showing me "five." At this point I was getting annoyed and did not understand why I would need to pay another Y5, but whatever, I wanted my food. I went back to the foodcard woman, gave her another Y5 and went back to the noodle woman. This time she would not take my card, I was utterly confused. Then this other guy (I have no clue if he worked there or not) started yelling something at me in Chinese (like yelling it will make me understand you any better) and had me follow him back to the stall where I got the foodcard. I don't know what happened, but he gave me back Y10 and then I got my food. Some how Alex did not have to go through all of that, so I don't know what I did wrong.

After eating we tried to find out track. Something I have learned from Alex is that when asking questions in China, make sure to ask several different people until you get a confirmed answer. We asked five different people what track our train was on and got three different answers. Once on the train we found our sleeper room and it was awesome! I have never been on a sleeper and it was really exciting. We were also spoiled because there was no one else in our room. On the train they gave us a complimentary dinner which was halfway decent. There was some weird pack that we could not identify. Might have been cold noodles, cabbage, jellyfish? We did not try it. We got to listen to Chinese smooth jazz and pop songs on the train and had a blast with that. There is one song where they try to sing in English but we couldn't even understand that.

To be continued . . .