Nanjing: Planes, Trains, and the Paparazzi

So my last full-fledged trip of this term started out as all the others—with transportation of course. This one required more than the others though, because as my travel buddies were aiming to save money, we opted to take trains over planes.

Nanjing is 733 miles or 1,180 kilometers from Hong Kong and would have taken two hours to fly there. As trains go, the one going from Shenzhen (Hong Kong’s Mainland border city) to its terminal at Nanjing Station would have taken twenty-five hours. In contrast, the train to Shanghai South Station would take eighteen hours and then a high-speed train to Nanjing would add on two hours from Shanghai Station via a twelve-stop metro journey. We opted for the latter.

And we couldn’t take one of the MTR through trains, which go almost non-stop to either Shanghai or Beijing from Kowloon (Hung Hom Station), because they go every other day, which for our schedule happened to fit on the wrong days.

Chinese trains are annoying. They’re decently convenient time-wise and reasonably priced. The problem is that you can’t book tickets online. I went to a travel agent (China Travel Service) and found that you have to book tickets at the stations themselves. Hong Kong’s train stations are owned and operated by the MTR Corporation, the same company that owns and operates the subway system. This means that to buy tickets in advance, you would have to truck yourself the hour and a half north to Shenzhen to buy your tickets since the rail facilities here are neither owned nor operated by the same people in Mainland China.

This trek up to Shenzhen wasn’t too appealing, and we figured we’d be able to get tickets shortly before departure, since we did the same for one person for the train to Guilin. Also, there was only one train scheduled each way each day, so we figured that ridership did not afford more than one train a day. Ultimately, we had to find our way up to Nanjing, because we’d already paid for the hotel and I’d already booked my flight back.

We were wrong on both accounts. The train was to leave at 13:29 and arrive at Shanghai South at 6:58, so early in the morning on Friday we got to Shenzhen. We went up to the counter and we were kindly informed that there were no beds left. This meant that we had to buy a seat. Fine. We had to get up to Nanjing, and a seat would do just that, so we bought our tickets and started counting down the hours until hell.

Now I know how I do with long flights. I’ve got a yearly quota for the number of flights over five hours I can handle. This train was going to be eighteen hours sitting. In comparison, my flight from San Francisco was only fourteen hours long and my flight earlier this summer from Los Angeles to Zurich was but eleven.

Well, anyways, the time came and we all got squished while queuing to get onto the train. I always thought it was pointless to squeeze onto mass transit vehicles, because if you’ve got a ticket, you’re getting on, and the vehicle isn’t going to go any sooner if you get on it first. Oh well.

The train was set up in tables. On half of the train, there were six seats in two rows of three around a four-person table. On the other half of the train, there were four seats in two rows of two. In between was an aisle just slightly bigger than that on an airplane.

Like the train to Guilin, in between the sleepers and the seats there was the dining car. While looking for it, I realized I had no idea how to call in Mandarin, so I called it a restaurant, and the staff looked at me like I was stupid. Instead, we met a businessman named Sharp that had approached us half because he was just being friendly and half because he was taking advantage of the opportunity to practice his English with us (my white friends more than me).

Eventually we got our dinner and found wandered back to our table set up. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the seats were facing in the same direction, because the guys across from us wouldn’t stop staring at us, half because my friends are white, half because I was speaking English, and entirely because we were all associating ourselves with each other.

What made the trip worse was that it just seemed to get more and more crowded. People were crowding the areas between cars as well as making use of the bathroom sinks and floors as beds. With pooper stoopers, the floor just got dirtier and dirtier, and it was pretty apparent as seen by the color what this dirt was actually made of. These people who wandered onto the train without a seat I assumed paid to stand, but took the opportunity to claim a seat when one arose. After going to the wrong side of the train (because Car No. 1 was connected at the back to Car No. 16), we found some guys in our seats. I asked them to move in Mandarin, and an older man replied to me in English “switch seats.” Without gesturing which seats to switch to, had he meant switching at all, we just waited until they got out of our seats. In the process of moving themselves and their stuff, they had to move their circular saw from under one table to another, which I thought was peculiar. We had just gone through x-ray security not fifteen minutes ago.

Needless to say, I read an entire book in one sitting (though it was only 180 pages long) in two hours and proceeded to eat two trays of Mandarin oranges and one tray of bananas that we paid ¥10 CNY in total for. After exhausting things to do (because it was difficult to pull my binder out of my bag to study) it was about time to go to sleep. We had hoped that they’d turn off or at least dim the lights after 11:00 p.m. But when 11:00 p.m. came and went, we hoped for midnight. And by the time I fell asleep it became apparent that the lights were there to stay. I got all of about five hours of sleep on that eighteen-hour train ride. One of my friends got as little as half an hour. We all decided that airplanes are much better than hard seats on Chinese trains.

We arrived at Shanghai South Station at about 7:30 a.m. but had to stay there until the ticket office opened at 8:00 a.m. to help my friends buy tickets back for later in the week. I was to leave from Nanjing by air but they were going to come back to Shanghai to scout the place out. One of them studies Mandarin but neither of them felt they had the capacity to negotiate hard-sleepers back to Shenzhen. I actually found that I did the whole thing without any effort. They got their train tickets back, and what’s better is they got hard sleepers—so the hellish ride there wouldn’t be a hellish ride back.

We ate breakfast at a place called Mister Donut in the train station. My problem with eating doughnuts is that they make me feel like a doughnut in the short term as well as in the long term.

Next up, we had to get from one train station to the other, because trains to Nanjing left from Shanghai Station, and we were currently at Shanghai South Station. This was anticipated and hence smooth. For ¥4 CNY, we went the twelve stops along Line 1 of the Shanghai Metro to Shanghai Station.

Although it was going very well, at Shanghai Station, our luck had apparently run low. We waited to buy train tickets to Nanjing at the automated machines and waited for a long time. By the time we got up to the front, the every other machine went out of order, including ours, so we were ushered a block down to the ticket office. It was packed. Luckily we got our train tickets without much ado.

Waiting turned out to be a prelude for what was to come next. Already in the eighteen-hour train, our group of three had elicited many looks from the Chinese countrymen. What are two white people doing in a Chinese long-distance train? What is that Chinese guy doing with them? Is that English they’re speaking? 我听不懂! Needless to say, I explained to a lot of people who asked that they’re Scottish and Australian. If you care, I’m American. Yes, they’re my classmates and we study in Hong Kong.

In the waiting room in Shanghai Station though, we noticed though that people were taking pictures. My friend said, “Paparazzi, twelve o’clock.” I looked. There, on one knee a guy had his camera phone out with the lens noticeably popped out, snapping away at the white people. Another guy had a full-on camera out. One of their flashes went off. I wondered if these people saved these pictures for their friends and went like “I saw white people at Shanghai Station!” I don’t think my friends got their pictures taken in Beijing, and I thought Shanghai had more tourists and non-Chinese business people and non-Chinese people in general. Like I said though, this incident was a prelude.

The train journey from Shanghai to Nanjing was about two hours in length. The modern high-speed trains of China Railway High-Speed (CRH) were a lot cleaner and a lot more streamlined than the aging conventional rail ones. The staff were friendlier as were the passengers themselves, though granted this time we were all facing the same direction. The English displayed on the message board in the cabin was a little shotty and all, but at least it was understandable—bottom line was that we weren’t there for the English.

While napping, one of the staff members picked up my friend’s camera and woke her up. He said something to the effect of she should put that camera away because people can take it while she’s sleeping, especially because there’s nothing pretty to take pictures of inside this train. Between each statement, he would say, “” to which she would nod her head. I thought that she was actually answering his questions, that she did understand what he was saying like he asked. She was just nodding yes. So here’s a lesson: like my mom’s friend said, if you don’t understand something, it works more often than not to answer in the negative. No!

After arriving in Nanjing, we had our hotel address on a piece of paper (in pinyin only, unfortunately). We got in an unregulated taxi by accident and got ripped off. For the three of us, he charged ¥200 to take us to our hotel, which wasn’t that far away. However though, he helped us through our address dilemma, since it seems that most people in China don’t read pinyin (because they read the harder characters). He drove us to one hotel, where we asked concierge where our hotel was. They didn’t know the hotel’s name (it was a Holiday Inn, but no one calls it that because it has a Chinese name), so he said he would take me to the address. I said that was great. Later, looking at a map, the hotel was super close to one of the metro stops and we could have gotten there, had we planned better, for ¥2-4 each. Oh well. Lesson learned.