Still in Beijing

I've never had this much difficulty in moving out of a city I'm in. Yesterday Lexie and I grabbed our backpacks and went down to the Beijing train station to try to head down to Qufu, the hometown of Confucius and about 9 hours away by rail. This effort failed spectacularly. It started off somewhat inauspiciously since the subway we got on cruised right past the darkened Beijing Train Station subway stop. Fine. We got off at the next one and hoofed it back towards the station. Lonely Planet indicated that one window in the cavernous ticketing building spoke English. Not true. No one seemed to. A bystander tried to help us, but all the trains to Qufu were booked up, except for a standing ticket (exactly what it sounds like). There were some other places we would also consider traveling to, but the difficulty in communicating anything convinced us that we should try something else.

We went outside and headed for a nearby large hotel, figuring that maybe they could help (in English), and indeed there was a "business center" with two people who did speak a little English. However, for the several cities we mentioned, all the trains were booked up for that day. Eventually we decided on some city to go to, honestly I don't remember which right now, and one of our helpers went over to the station to buy the tickets. While over there, she called back and said that in fact there were two "soft sleeper" (1st class) tickets to Yanzhou available, the city near Qufu.

I'll cut the story short by just saying that hours later we discovered that we had bought tickets to Yangzhou, not Yanzhou, and were headed for someplace down near Nanjing, totally away from the direction we wanted to go. Returning the tickets was amazingly no problem, though they took a hefty cancellation fee which we just decided to bite. Thus, feeling exhausted, we decided that China had won and we retreated back to the Carters for the night, had dinner, and slept 10 hours.

This was a miserable day. Any attempt of mine to speak Chinese seems completely ineffectual, the transit system is not at all well geared towards foreigners, and it is likewise apparently extremely busy. In the end, none of what happened was particularly surprising, since we were aware that we should be booking tickets ahead of time, and it was stupid to not get around to it until the day of travel. (In our defense, the preceding 2 days were Sunday and a national holiday, and though we intended to go to a travel agent, we couldn't.) Nevertheless, that's what happened. I realize that in other countries I've been to where I don't know the writing system Egypt, Thailand, and Tunisia, there has been a much higher proportion of English speakers, or at the very least Latin script writing. China has comparatively very little western writing, and has left it off altogether in places you might expect it, like the giant, (digital!) train timetable in the Beijing station. Likewise, English is very uncommon, and typically low fluency. The latter doesn't surprise me, but the former does. At the moment the only way I feel we can move from place to place is to go through someone who can go buy the tickets for us. This is made more frustrating by the apparently very high demand for train tickets, so we have to plan at least several days ahead, it seems. I'd rather get to a place, decide if I like it, and then buy the onward transportation tickets. I hear buses are easier to get on the day of travel, but who knows how easy navigating the purchasing of tickets will be with them.

Just to bring things up to date, today we went to a nearby travel agent and were able to successfully buy new tickets for Datong, our next destination and home of some great Buddhist art and caves, we hear. We go by overnight train tomorrow, so one more day in Beijing, and then we're finally off! Despite being slightly annoyed by the delays and difficulties, it will be good to head off into the rest of the country.