The sleeper train wasn't so bad. I was in 2nd class, which means I get a bed with a foam pad on it. The beds are arranged in bunks stacked in threes, seperated in little alleys with 6 total beds. My little alley had 2 older couples on the bottom bunks and me and this other lady on the top. Despite not speaking much English, I made friends with them all. They were interested in watching me use my laptop. I think my reward was that they shared all the food they had with me: nuts, crackers, some fermented tofu strips, and some crab apples.
I slept well. I don't think I woke up once until morning. The only annoying thing about the hard sleeper is that there are just beds (ok there are 2 small seats that fold into the wall, but they are right in the walkway), so if you aren't sleeping the only place you can really sit is on the bottom bunks, which means you need to make friends with whoever is inhabiting them. Luckily my group was cool, so I sat there for the 4 hours of train riding after waking up. I played Diner Dash on my laptop and tried to get the older lady next to me to join in. She didn't, but she totally cheered me on.
The only Chinese Language reference I had was the few pages in my Lonely Planet book--its not very much, but I tried to communicate using that. The younger lady in my alley was curious where I was going, and I was curious about how I would get to my hostel, because I knew the train station I would get off at was technically not the closest train station I could be using. I was able to convey this to her, that I wanted to go to central Xi'an, and was planning on taking a taxi, but she was saying no to that. It turned out that her destination was very close to mine, and she would lead me.
Her name was Ying Ying. She worked at a cosmetic company, gave me an Orion Cake (Moon Pie knock off--clever huh?), and gave me a grand tour of Xi'an. First we got off at Xi'an South station--45km from where I needed to be. Within 5 minutes another train came in and we got on it. We were supposed to purchase tickets (less than a dollar), but I would never have known to, so Ying Ying handled this. The train went to Xi'an station. We got off and one of Ying Ying's friends, Yonjaio, was waiting for us. This lady actually spoke decent English. They wanted to take me to my hostel and then take me out for lunch in the Muslim Quarter (a popular spot in Xi'an). The food was a Xi'an specialty--a lamb soup with some breadlike cubes in it. It was great. I'm not sure if its a traditional Muslim food or some sort of Chinese-Muslim fusion, but I could eat it like 100 times in a row without tiring of it.
Next we walked back towards my hostel and popped into a fancy cafe that probably gets more white people than Chinese. I walked in and tried to greet the workers with a "Ni Hao" (hello), but I was greeted with an English hello. One of the guys at the front had dropped a pen and I picked it up for him--he gave me a courteous Xie Xie (thank you), but was scolded by his superior for not saying "thank you". I guess I should appreciate the effort they made to speak English, but it kinda feels wrong--almost a bit over-entitled, but apparentally a lot of English speakers feel that way, and refuse to even attempt the local dialects.
I got coffee for round one, and then we had some fruit tea made from dried oranges and maybe some tea? I'm not really sure, but it looked like tang in the glass. It tasted similar too, sans the grit.
I got back to the hostel at around 8 and found Pieter hanging out in the cafe. It was really exciting to meet up again. He shared some tales of his few days in Xi'an, then we talked some politics, as I'm getting excited to see California finally legalize pot, and then I took a bit of a wander around the hostel. It was a cool layout. The hostel has 2 atriums, which seemd a bit dumb at this time of year as it was kinda cold, and rainy, but it was still really pretty and I could imagine it is amazing in the warmer months. The hostel is like a big rectangle, with the lobby and the cafe at either end, and the two atriums in the middle, separated by a hallway. The only problem I had with it was that since it was cold, everyone was smoking in the lobby and the cafe because they were the only 2 enclosed public areas, which meant they were warm, but thats where I wanted to hang out too, and they had zero ventilation. I probably had a couple packs of second hand smoke in the time I was there.
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