From Macau to Nanjing

Well, dear ones, I have not ever been terribly good about keeping a regular journal. Internet restrictions had me worried for a while that I wouldn’t be able to share much with you, so I was slightly less motivated to write than I should have been.

It has been an eventful week. I left Macau a week ago this morning, heading out from my friends’ apartment at about 10am to catch a taxi to the mainland border at Zhuhai. The 服务员 (Fuwuyuan, or service worker) in Macau customs let my red and sweating countenance pass because I assured them that I had not been anywhere but Macau for the last week, and that my temperature was raised because of the 95°F weather, the 90% humidity, and definitely not H1N1.
I changed money just after crossing the border into Zhuhai (from the Macau Patacas a Baha’i had used to pay me back when I bought her something with my debit card) and then boarded a bus to Guangzhou. I bought the ticket and boarded my bus with the help of a middle-aged bus station worker who was selling magazines and commiserated with me (in Chinese- he was delighted to find I understood him) that I was moving internationally and carrying everything with me.

It took about two hours to get to Guangzhou (the capital of the province we in the West formerly called Canton). It took another half an hour to get to the last stop, which the driver told me was closest to Guangzhou Train Station, whence I took a taxi and proceeded to drag my luggage all over in a sweaty, undignified, and in the end nigh-hopeless manner, before I finally located the ticket counter. After purchasing my ticket for the next morning, and eventually evincing the location of the luggage station from the overworked 服务员 at the counter, I was again unceremoniously dragging my luggage through the afternoon heat when a girl about my age walked by and asked where I was going. I told her, and she helped me carry my luggage over and explain to the 服务员 there what needed to be explained (they spoke Mandarin, but with an accent, and were more comfortable with Cantonese). We chatted for a while with one of the workers while waiting for my final receipt. He went off on a long tangent which started with something about coming to China and actually talking to people and studying the language and traveling and ended a couple of minutes later with me smiling as politely as I know how. My new friend turned to me and asked if I had understood (“你听懂了吗？“) I said that I hadn’t, really (“…没有“) and she said “he thinks you’re very cool” (“他说你很棒“)。 As we were leaving the train station my new friend told me to call her “Wing” in English, gave me her phone number, and told me if I ever came back to Guangzhou I should call her and she would show me around. Then she gave me a hug, pointed me to my subway stop, and got on her bus.

I found the subway with minimal problems- only a few taxi drivers stopped me and insisted I let then drive me for “only” four times what it should have cost to get to my hostel. Once I was in the subway directions were all clearly posted in both English and Chinese and I made it to my hostel about half an hour later.

Let me just say that Hostelling International is fantastic. I stayed in one of their hostels in Shanghai three years ago, and this one was just as great. They have clean, comfortable beds, wireless internet, English-speaking staff, bicycles for rent, and the dorm-style rooms cost less than $10 a night. Moving on.

I found a restaurant around the corner and then wandered up and down the walkway next to the Pearl River for quite a while, thinking about development and trying to decide where I belong in the world. I left the US almost a month ago, and I just realized today that it would be possible for me to be homesick. I’m not. I love it here, despite the noise, the crowds, the pollution, and the language barrier. China is magnetic. During introductions among the internationals here at Hopkins-Nanjing on Monday, so many people talked about how they had studied here and then gone back to the US and just felt wrong. But! I am getting ahead of myself.

I came back to the hostel, talked to my mother and some dude in Korea via Skype, and went to bed quite early. I woke up at 5:45, changed, grabbed my things while trying not to disturb my three roommates, turned in my key, and headed back to the subway and thence the train station (广州火车站)。 I got to my excessively air-conditioned waiting room about two hours before my train boarded. I took my non-drowsy Dramamine and my vitamins, and eventually moved my backpack off the seat next to me so a middle-aged local woman could sit down, and made a friend. She asked me a bit about myself, but her accent was strong enough and my Chinese is pathetic enough that we didn’t get very far before we decided mostly to smile and occasionally remark to each other on how very cold the air conditioning was. She shared her towel/makeshift blanket with me, and watched my bag while I bought water.

We boarded the train about ten minutes before it departed, and I found myself on the top bunk in a “hard sleeper” car, which meant that there were two bunks below me and I did not have room to sit up on my berth. The car was open, with walls separating every other column of beds into six-person compartments. There were a total of 66 people in the car. I was definitely the only foreigner.

I climbed into my bunk thought to myself for about ten minutes about how this was probably the longest train ride I would take this year in China (it was scheduled to take 25 hours) and I should really take advantage of the view out the window from the few seats provided below before I passed out. “Non-drowsy” is a very hopeful label.

I woke up sometime that afternoon to the train’s 服务员 asking me for my social security number. I informed her that I didn’t have one, and she accepted just my name.

I went and sat on a fold down seat next to a small table attached to the wall and looked out the window. A young man came and sat across from me, and asked me in English what my name was, what I was doing in China, etc. He told me he was on his was to college after three years with the People’s Liberation Army, and we chatted a bit about his experiences and plans for school before lapsing to just looking out the window and occasionally asking each other how to say something in each others’ language.

After half an hour or so of that, a couple of women in the compartment behind me starting talking about me in Chinese. “See that foreigner? She’s rather pretty, don’t you think?” “What do you think about her clothes?” Then they asked a man sitting across from them about me. “Do you see that foreigner? Where do you think she is from? Somewhere in Europe? England, maybe?” I turned around and said, in Chinese, “I am from America.” The women said “Ohhhh. She understands.”

What followed was an hour of half a dozen passengers asking me (and another dozen or so listening to me talk) about myself, my family, my studies, my plans, my thoughts about China, my thoughts about the US, until we got to a level of questioning that my language skills simply could not handle and I bid them adieu and passed out in my bunk for another 5 fours or so. I slept most of the rest of the time.

We got into the Nanjing train station (南京火车站) at about noon the next day, and after about three and a half hours I gave up on my luggage appearing that day and headed to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, which adventure I will discuss in my next post.

… that was a really long post!