Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and Gondolas

Traveling around China is much more of an adventure compared to traveling around The Glorious United States of America.  For one thing, there are very different options for traveling and all the options have their pros and cons.  This post is devoted to the (less) awesome aspects of different modes of transportation in China.

Planes.

Planes (飞机) are one of the dominant modes of transportation in both the United States of Awesome and the People’s Republic (what makes it a Republic?) of China.  The government has recently finished building a massive (marginally smaller than Jupiter) new terminal at the Beijing airport.  It’s very nice and clean (which is very different from the rest of China).  The one downside to traveling on planes is that it is far and away the most expensive way to get around China.  I’ll let you know how it goes when I take my first domestic flight.

Trains.

It is important to realize that there are two different kinds of trains in China.  Let’s first focus on the Subway.  The subway is the cheapest way to get around the city and depending on the time you go it is even possible to get a seat!  It costs the equivalent of $.30 every time I go on the subway and all I have to do is put my wallet near the scanner at all subway stations.  Since there is a subway station right by my apartment (公寓), it is very convenient to take the subway everywhere around the city.  Sometimes though the subway is packed and there are people whose job is squishing as many people onto the subway as possible.  Lets just say you get to know the people standing next to you far better than you would ever want to.  On the other hand, I was taking the subway a couple days ago and there was a man who was just sitting there folding origami animals and handing them out to people.

There are also the trains that take you from city to city.  You can either take a soft sleeper (an actual bed. AKA the best way to travel on the train), a hard sleeper (a bed, but not as comfortable), a soft seat (like an airplane seat except it doesn’t recline), a hard seat (terrible.), and then worst-case scenario is standing only.  This past weekend I went to Tai’an to go to the mountain Tai Shan.  The train ride was 8 hours each way.  I unfortunately did not have a soft sleeper, or a hard sleeper, or a soft seat.  I got stuck in a hard seat next to a Chinese woman who was monopolizing all my leg space with her massive bags that were filled with some kind of juice.  We’re just going to call it “China-Juice” because I have no idea what it was.  Then she got up and left and I finally had space to actually sit comfortably.  Then some man came down and sat in her seat.  He proceeded to hawk up loogies, smell terrible, and basically embody everything that makes me angry at China.  I therefore left my seat and stood for the rest of my trip because I couldn’t stand that guy.

On the way back to Beijing, I was stuck standing.  Imagine a time you had no fun.  Got it?  This was worse.  I was standing for a couple of hours before some Chinese guy decided that I could take his seat.  When I sat down, the Chinese people around me proceeded to teach me Chinese card games, ask me about America, ask me about China, and also had some very weird requests.  They asked me to sing and dance.  Ok.  Let’s think about this.  A bunch of random Chinese people asked a foreigner on the train to sing and dance.  DO I LOOK LIKE I’M AN ENTERTAINER?  I DO NOT LIKE SINGING.  I DO NOT DANCE (To all family members: please skip to next line.) UNLESS I AM ‘NOT SOBER’.

I was moderately offended but I decided to keep talking to these people because it was great opportunity to practice my Chinese.  We ended up talking about everything from Swine Flu to Skype.  At one point I was drawing a crowd because so many Chinese people wanted to see the foreigner speak Chinese.  It was weird.

Automobiles.

I am not allowed to drive in China seeing as I don’t have a Chinese drivers license.  However, I have extensively taken part in the ritual of taking a cab.  Cab drivers are… either awesome… or… assholes.  There truly is no middle ground.  Some cab drivers will be jolly, get you to your destination the fastest way possible, and not spit or smoke in the car.  Other drivers will: get lost, spit and smoke while driving, not talk, and blatantly rip me off for being a foreigner.  I somewhat know my way around Beijing so if I know that a driver is deliberately ripping me off, I will direct him or her to the right street.  Other times, the driver will take the longest route possible and when that happens, I get angry.  The drivers don’t like me when I’m angry.  I grow to 50 feet tall, turn green, and crush their car.  Kind of.  I just end up paying them a lot less than the meter in the cab says and tell them that I’m not an idiot and that it was too expensive and just walk away.  They don’t like this.  They can fricken deal with it.  Just because I’m a foreigner doesn’t mean they can rip me off.

Gondolas.

The preferred way to travel.  For sure.

While at Tai Shan, I realized there was a far easier way of getting down the mountain than walking down.  Any guesses as to how I got down the mountain.  Hint: I didn’t ride a yak down the mountain. 

I took a gondola.  It was awesome.  Granted, I did have to wait about 2 to 3 hours to get on the gondola during which time I would have made it to the bottom of the mountain had I walked.  The gondola ride was about 10 minutes long and allowed me to get amazing pictures of the surrounding area.  Plus, while I was waiting in line, I met a tour guide who spoke English and he offered to help me find a hotel for the night (I was homeless for a few hours) and also offered to help me find other places to visit around China.  I was rockin’ the Guanxi with him.  I’ll explain what Guanxi is in a later post and also describe the extent to which I have Guanxi.

 

I hope this was an informative narrative on how travel in China works.  I’ll see you all in a couple months!