Stranger No More

So far so good but I’ve only been here a couple of hours.

I left Datong on Thursday morning with the help of Ping who rode with me to the bus station. She has been such a wonderful friend to both Jed and I. I was able to catch a 0700 bus and arrived in Taiyuan around 1030. I trudged with all my bags to the train station, a long couple of blocks. Along the way an old man with a taxi-trike was trying to get me to go with him despite my ‘boo-yow’ reply so I finally said, ‘ling kwy?’ which elicited laughter from those around us. Ling means zero and kwy is like dollar. I continue to crack me up. With the note Ping had written me I was able to buy a soft sleeper for 176RMB for the 27 hour trip.

With a couple of hours to kill I trudged back up the street and found a phone and called Kevin and Vivian to see if they wanted to have lunch. They met me back in front of the train station about 40 minutes later and we went to McDonalds. Yup. I don’t like McD’s in the states but a burger was sounding good. That is about how it was but the fries really hit the spot. I bought a couple of cheeseburgers to put in my bag for the trip. I’m a genius.

I got back to the train station in time to walk right onto the train where my soft sleeper was the top bunk of three. A low ceiling met me. I crawled my old-feeling ass up into it and stayed for a couple of hours before I climbed down and looked out the window for a few minutes. Nothing great so I climbed back up and read until nearly 2200 before sleeping all night. There are straps to keep you from falling out. In the morning I went back to the window where I felt like I was home. The magnificent scenery reminded me of both Oregon and Alaska. With a mist hanging the mountains were covered with brush were there weren’t terraces for farming the land. They have been farming these mountains longer than we have been a country. Awesome. I cracked a smile the first time I realized that those were bamboo trees!

I met a nice guy whose English name is Brett that goes to university in Taiyuan and was going to meet a friend in Chengdu for a day before returning on the 27 hour train ride. He told me he has had a girlfriend for two months but that I made him feel ‘like I am no more’. I laughed and told him that was about my average; two months. His only English studies were what he learned in middle school. He was pretty impressive.

I was met at the train station by Teresa who took me to the Datong Hotel. Yeah, no kidding. They weren’t accepting foreigners so we went around the corner to the designated foreigner hotel where she registered my and paid for my room. After helping me up to the room she took me out to dinner. Real Sichuan food and it is spicy. It took her about two seconds to tell me I had poor kwhy-zuh skills. I laughed because she is right. These type of bosses here are more like agents but she expressed her confidence in me and I told her I looked forward to doing a good job for her. Tomorrow she is going to take me to meet Ray the full-time foreign teacher in Chengdu. We will drive to Santai on Monday.

Since it is getting late on Friday, I’m going to go clean up and hit the hay. I took a lot of pics of the Dr. Seuss landscape. I’ll sort through those and send y’all some tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2004 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Life in China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.