I've made some progress with the backlog of notes. Still to come:

Beijing wedding Sunday at Ziyuan Zhengzhou, Kaifung, and the possibility of Jewish blood in Chang's family

01 Oct 2001: National Day Train Trip

After much last-minute rearranging and scrambling, Zhang Ming sent me off in a taxi to Guilin Institute of Technology, where I waited at the gate for Mr Li until a guard walked me across most of the campus. I thought he was walking me to the Americans' dorm but we ended up at a phone, so I paged Mr Li. He met us a few minutes later in a car just like the tinted-window sedan of GUET. I joined the other Americans in the back seat and we headed for the train station to catch the 11:25 pm train.

Boarding, naturally, was an adventure. I headed off for the front of the train because, well, my ticket said car three. The other Americans, destined for car six, headed in the other direction. After repeated, increasingly hurried stops for directions, I ended up boarding three cars from the rear of the train.

Soon enough we pulled out of the station. I had top bunk, and there was quite a bit of fuss when a women wanted to trade bunks with me. Well, I think that's what she wanted. She showed me her ticket, which was for car 2, and I tried to collect my stuff and head to her bunk, but that got shot down so I just stayed put. A conductor went by, exchanging little tags for our tickets, and I tried to explain that I wanted to go on to Zhengzhou instead of getting off at Wuhan like my ticket said. More literally, I said, "Wo yao qu Zhengzhou." I want go Zhengzhou.

The conductor said something that might have been, "We all want to go to Zhengzhou, kid," and headed off.

I settled into my top bunk. Orientation was a challenge. At one end of the compartment was a whirring metal cage fan than clanked and threw sparks from the housing. At the other end, a foot from the bunk, was a wall-mounted loudspeaker. I put in my earplugs and kept my distance from the sparks. At some point in the night the guy across the way turned off the fan, and I slept fairly well except for waking every few hours when we stopped.

A group of English teachers from Gong Yi Middle School, 90 kilometers west of Zhongzhou, is taking care of me. The ticket change cost Y85 and went off without a hitch. Also I was shown the source of the hot water for each car - a coal-fired boiler from which you can draw directly. Ok, I'm not too worried about drinking the water on the trains now.

The weather is much improved from last month, when I covered the same ground headed south. This morning was perfect, sunny and, with the 100 kph wind chill, cool but not chilling. Visibility was quite good in some plaes, and the countryside in places looked downright beautiful.

Speed is, of course, relative. Sitting on a fold-down chair at an open window on a train going a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, you feel a tremendous sensation of speed. And when minute droplets of water, bits of mist, keep catching you in the face, on the cheecks and on the lips, you try to imagine that the water comes mysteriously from the cloudless sky, not from the steady drip feed that rinses the toilet of the car ahead of you before falling to the tracks, perhaps to be vaporized and propelled back into the air by the enormous speed with which it hits the ground.

And then a train passes on the opposite tracks, whizzing by less than ten feet away at a net speed of well over two hundred kilometers an hour. A bit of a shock to the system.

I tried to find the GIT teachers in the morning. Since I'm in car three and they're in car six, I went three cars forward and started looking. No dice, so I gave up and went back.

The food vendor doesn't like me. He got very aggressive in the morning trying to sell me stuff. He got very aggressive in the early afternoon. I'm eating very little; a pb sandwich for breakfast, some crackers the rest of the day. I brought dried banana chips but, after tasting a few, I'd rather eat the creepy crawlies of the vendor. I'm finally paying for my mini-fast with a headache, probably abetted by the cigarette smoke. I held the door open for vendor's cart this afternoon as a peace offering, and the next pass through he was slightly nicer, or at least only shouted in my face once. I've only seen two medium-sized cockroaches in my alcove . Oh, and a fat ugly man who's gone shirtless all day, sometimes passing by with his equally genetically cursed progeny.

Why does stream control always elude us at the most important moments? At home one can hit bullseye after bulls-eye, even nail the red light cast by Kevin Courtney's seat-up-or-down-detector. But hen you need it, when your on a train, it shoots left, it shoots right, the stream doesn't cohere, you get split streams - the whole catalog of hydrodynamic dysfunction.

I've been in China for six weeks and I still flinch every time I hear someone hawk and spit on the floor.

I found the GIT teachers. They were in the next car, car six. (Do I even need to mention that the numbers on placards at the end of each car are completely different?) I borrowed their Lonely Planet China book and read for a bit. It says that Zhengzhou is not worth stopping in except en route to other places.

Mr Yu Ji Kuan, one of the middle school English teachers, saw me typing, and I have offered to take dictation. Mr Yu says: "I'm very glad to meet an American friend on the train. And, ah, during the journey, we talked a lot. I am very glad. I hope sometime later I can visit America. That's my hope. At last tell them I wish them a very happy festival. "

The trip is 21 hours in total, and the train has stayed almost exactly on schedule. Most passengers emptied out before noon, and our car was more than half empty for the last eight hours or so. The GIT teachers got off around 2 pm at Wuhan, shortly after we crossed the Chang Jiang, a branch of the Yangtze River. A bit bigger than the Columbia at Portland, I think, and the river still has quite a ways to go to Shanghai and the sea.

We've entered deep twilight, but, unlike on last month's trip from Beijing, we are not surrounded by total darkness. It's harvest time -- odd that that would coincide with the Mid-Autumn festival, neh? -- and the fields are dotted with burning stacks of straw. It looks very neat, though it does nothing good for the air quality. With a full moon, the countryside still looks pretty damn dark, but outlines of mountains are occasionally visible.

In the two hours between the penultimate stop and Zhengzhou, I went walking down the train to check out hard seat. In most cars the cleaning crew is already taking up the carpeting and cleaning out the cars. Past the soft sleeper car, and the dining car I found hard seat. Padded booth-style seats, three abreast on each side of the aisle. Fairly crowded. One person was walking by with a bamboo bong. Not a Chinese cultural artifact that looked like a bong, but an actual mid-sized bong with that metal filter thingie on the side. On the way back I got locked out of an empty car with a wet floor, causing momentary panic until someone came and opened it for me.

Finally we arrived in Zhengzhou. I stood on the platform with the English teachers as we waited for what seemed like most of the teaching staff of Gong Yi Middle School trickled out of the train. Finally we took off, and one woman walked me right to the south gate, where Chang was waiting on the other side of the turnstyle. Changimal!