Rio de Emocion

Shanghai is the first civilized city I've seen in this country, and probably the only one. If 'civilization' means eating brand-name crap at overpriced stores in the company of twenty-three million people in the largest city in the world.


Shanghai baby!

It took me a while to get there. First stop from Beijing was mount Wutai. My train departs on the night of october 1st, the founding day of the People's Republic and a national holiday. Golden Week is crazy in China, with hundreds of millions of Chinese people moving across the country to visit relatives or enjoy a holiday in distant provinces. With their train network already being the world's most overloaded, it means tickets are hard to find, let alone seats.

Once again, I find myself sleeping on dirty train floors. After three days of being on the road in hot summer weather, you start to care less. Hours of walking around with a backpack have soaked my shirt with old and new sweat, combining to form some exquisite hobo smell. My one-time buddies on the trains don't seem to care. It's not like they stop offering cigarettes. I don't refuse them, because I'm worried it will insult their honor. They just keep insisting, anyway. Chinese air contains worse things to breathe in than cigarette smoke.



All's well and I finally arrive at the national park of the sacred mountain. What was supposed to be a quiet mountain trek among peaceful Buddhist monasteries was actually a slow slog through thousands of Chinese tourists in an overcrowded tourist park full of hotels, overpriced food and construction projects.

Suffices to say I got the hell out of there, but not after climbing some thousand-step staircase. There's buddhist stuff everywhere and another temple at the top. Some guy has a grey colored fox in a cage.

Turns out there's no more trains leaving to Taiyuan, the closest city and the capital of the province. Seems like I'll have to wait until tomorrow to be able to leave this tourist death trap - and there's no way I'm gonna pay three times as much as a room would normally cost, so I'm looking around for places I could quietly sleep at night. After all, there's plenty of trees and bushes around here. Maybe I can crash down on a temple floor if the monks are nice.

After about an hour of trying to find my way to the bus station and trying my luck with the coaches going to Taiyuan, the friendly young lady working there informs me that the last bus left at 16.30 - about 15 minutes ago. I'm out of luck, and after an hour of calling she puts me on a bus back to the village and joins me to make sure I get to a hotel. I'm trying to find a way to explain to her I won't be needing a room for tonight when we stop at the coach station. It's my luck day. There's a guy in front of the station announcing that the coach to Taiyuan was delayed - it will arrive an hour from now!

It's a four-hour drive to the capital. The bus ride is uneventful. Chinese highways are dark. A baby accidentally pissed on my foot after I'd taken my shoes off to let them air a bit. It's late and dark when I arrive, Taiyuan looks pretty much like Beijing except everything is a bit older and there's less smog. Still lots of construction, lots of chinese restaurants lit by cheap LED. I'm trying to find my way to the train station to get my ticket to a next destination, wherever that may be. I ask my way around with the locals by drawing a picture of a train. The local kids at the hairdressing salon (still open at 23) seem to be pretty excited by this tall laowai visiting their dead-end town that's about the size of NYC. Everyone in the salon wants to take a picture with me.

Arriving at the train station. It looks exactly like the station in Beijing. New, kitschy looking building with a clock tower in the middle overlooking a large square, with a number of KFCs, McDonalds and other chain restaurants surrounding it. I go into the station and manage to buy a ticket to Jinan with the help of a local youth - it's the only location in the general direction of the southeast I could get a ticket to. The train leaves in about five hours. That leaves me with time to grab some food, walk around a bit and rest up at the station.

Jinan seems like a decent town. It has the atmosphere of a real city. It's not a beautiful city by any means and the architecture is far from interesting, but it seems to have some soul in it.
I try to find the famous Yellow River - cause smurf it, you gotta have seen some of those famous landmarks, right? A traffic guard point me to the north - the direction I just came from. About five or six kilometers, he says. "Just take the number 4 bus." Sorry bro, but if I can save 2 yuan by walking for an hour, I'll do it. Walking around for a few hours never killed nobody.

As the hours go by, the search becomes more desperate. Finally I manage to spot a bridge in the distance - that's gotta be it! Bridges go across rivers, and I've been walking far enough. Finally I'll see that Yellow River. It turns out to be a bridge spanning a highway over train tracks. A few hundred metres away I can see the train station I arrived from.

Only one more stop to go before Shanghai: Nanjing, the town known for the cruel war crimes the Japanese committed during WW2. The Chinese still aren't over that. The train arrives at Nanjing at three. I fall asleep at about 2.55, thinking it's the last stop and everyone is gonna get out when it's there. But it's not, I find out at four. Once again, I get a lucky break - the train is actually headed for Shanghai! I'll get there a few hours earlier than on my original schedule.


Nuclear holocausts are hilarious in China, though


next time something more substantial! Stay tuned