This past week has been full of some adventure. The holiday officially begins on September 29th for many people in the PRC. It’s convenient that the national holiday coincides with “Mid-Autumn Festival”. What this means for us 外国人 (foreigners) is that we get a nine-day holiday. Yay!
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but during the holiday it is next to impossible to buy train tickets to anywhere in the country. China has this awesome (insert sarcasm) plan that everyone in the country should have the same holiday. It sounds really great, right? Everyone in your family with the same holiday? You can all get together and no one has to worry about taking time off of work or whatnot. Awesome.
Not Awesome. Imagine everyone in America getting in their cars and going on vacation at the same time. Except, add a billion people, take away the cars, and smash everyone onto a train that’s not air-conditioned. (My friends, this is not much of an exaggeration.)
So back to the train tickets… the rule is this: you can purchase tickets ten day in advance of your journey. No more. If you go eleven days before, the ticket window lady says, ‘no!’ (sometimes in English). We were looking at leaving on the 1st because a couple travel companions had previous engagements during the weekend. So, ten days before that was this past Friday.
I went to the ticket office. And it went something like this… Amber: We need tickets for Beijing to Baishan City. Ticket Lady: 什么都没有 which means, “nothing.” I was discouraged, but my friend Mike began asking questions. Mike (to ticket lady): How are all these people buying tickets if there are none left? Ticket lady: they booked them on the phone. Mike: what? How? Ticket lady points to a sign. Mike: Amber, write that number down. Amber grabs tablet and types it in. Mike (to another guy in line): What day are you traveling? Guy in Line: two days from now. Mike: how are there tickets for that day? Guy in Line shrugs. Mike, confused, walks away from ticket office. Mike and Amber brainstorm other ways of getting to Changbaishan.
Later, I find myself at school with another teacher and our new assistant, Kevin. I give Kevin the train-ticket-booking-phone-number. He tries to call it and says to me that it’s not getting him anywhere. (Actually, he said it was useless). 🙂 He told me that there is a way of purchasing tickets online. How did I not know this before?!? Kevin looked it up and, sure enough, there were a few tickets left for us to purchase. I looked at Kevin and said, “why don’t more Chinese people use this website?” To which he responded, “they do, Amber.” 🙂
I don’t understand why we weren’t able to buy them at the ticket office. I don’t understand that if they go on sale 10 days before the departure date how they can be sold out already the morning they go on sale. I don’t understand. (It’s this way with many things in this country.) Apparently you can “fix” (or what English speakers call ‘reserve’) tickets on this website 12 days in advance. 🙂 Sweet! I immediately think that we are going to have to try to get our return tickets soon. Kevin!
To make a long story longer, we ended up getting tickets for early Monday morning into the following day. (They aren’t even for the whole way…somehow we’ll get there…) We were also able to get tickets for the return trip, sort of. It will definitely be an adventure.
There is one more wrench in the plans. Two of my travel buddies have their new visa interviews this week and the visa office will take their passports to process their visas. This means that they might not be able to get on the train… Another travel buddy had to give up his passport yesterday to change it into a student visa. He will not have his passport either. Whenever you stay in a hostel you have to have your passport for registration purposes. His won’t be with him. The two other companions will also be without passports. I’ll let you know how it all goes down. (Strangely enough, we were able to pick up their train tickets today with a copy of their passports…so maybe this is also legit?) One of my travel buddies is very good at talking himself out of situations in Chinese. Should be very entertaining. 🙂
Hopefully the next post will have some sweet photos from the top of Changbaishan!
