Day 7: Jiayuguan

After eating a quick breakfast, we were off to the train station to hop a train to Jiayuguan, where the western end of the Great Wall is. On the train, we were sitting across from a family, and the little girl made friends with us and taught us how to count on our fingers in Chinese (there’s special symbols for 6-10) and helped us read a comic book and played Chinese and American hand-clapping games with us. She was awesome. Her dad, upon finding out that Richard’s parents were Taiwanese, prodded Richard about Chinese politics and the issue of Taiwanese independence for a while. It was one of the more pleasant interactions that we had with Chinese people on our trip.

It turned out that the family we hung out with on the train was also going to the Great Wall, so we hung out with the little girl while we were there, which was fun, especially when our tour guide let us hold the tour flag! I felt so important. The Great Wall itself was a little disappointing, however. When they said that we were going to where the Great Wall ends in the desert, I pictured a crumbling Wall sort of trailing off into nothing in some hot, dusty, middle-of-nowhere place. However, the Wall at Jiayuguan actually ended in a fort, and it wasn’t crumbling in any way; in fact, it had been reconstructed and was staffed by dudes who dressed up as guards and rode around on horses doing pretend military rituals. It wasn’t too desert-y either; the fort was actually surrounded by some nice gardens and a lake. Too bad.

Try some Wall, it's delicious!














That night, we were supposed to take a sleeper train to Lanzhou with our Japanese and Korean friends. However, when the daoyou gave us our tickets, they were hard seat tickets instead of sleepers, and they didn’t even have seat numbers on them, which means that you don’t actually have a designated seat and you just have to fend for yourself and hope that there’s some spot for you to sit. We were a little worried about this, but the daoyou pointed to a man who was hanging around nearby and told us just to follow him and we’d be okay. We weren’t sure exactly how that was supposed to work, but we followed him into the station anyway and waited for our train.

In the train station, there was an adorable little Chinese boy, dressed in the usual fashion for small Chinese children: 8 zillion layers of clothing and split pants as an alternative to diapers. We watched him run around and play, but at one point he stopped strangely. After a second of confusion we figured out what was going on: the little boy was peeing on the floor. His mother, spotting this, came over and scooped him up, but not before he left a decent sized puddle on the floor. To solve this, she went over into the corner, got one of those twig brooms that Chinese people are always ineffectually sweeping at things with, and swept the puddle until it was smeared over a larger area. Satisfied with her work, she went back to sit down. We were both amused and disgusted, and vowed never to touch the bottoms of our shoes ever, ever again. China is dirty beyond imagination.

The culprit:


















But back to our strange man and our train tickets. We didn’t really know anything about this man, except that he was carrying a bag of bananas and a bag of what appeared to be some kind of strange noodle, maybe? We all walked through the ticket check, but the employees didn’t even ask the man to present his ticket. He then gave the two bags to some railroad employee, although we didn’t catch any conversation exchanged between them. Sketchayyyyy. He waited with us on the platform, but when we tried to ask him what was going on all he would tell us was bie haipa (“don’t be scared!”). He took our tickets, and told us just to get on the train and wait. When the train came, we all got onto a sleeper car with our luggage, and the man disappeared. We waited and waited, and they even pulled up the stairs and were preparing the train to leave, and our man hadn’t come back yet. As the train was just about to leave, the man came running back and gave me a handful of tickets through the train door. Magically, he had procured hard sleepers for me, Richard, and Casey, and soft sleepers for our two friends.

What was up with our sketchy man? Why was he even there? Although it was confusing at the time, it’s become clearer to me in hindsight: So, the man has some kind of guanxi with the people at the train station. To review: guanxi literally means “relations,” but in this case it more accurately means that he’s got connections at the train station who owe him a favor. The travel agency has a deal with the guanxi man. They charge us as if they’re getting us sleeper tickets, but then only buy us hard seat tickets, the cheapest kind. The guanxi man uses his guanxi (and bananas) to get our tickets upgraded, and in exchange the travel agency gives him a cut of the profit they’re making off of us. The guanxi man wins, the travel agency wins, and the confused tourists probably never exactly know what happened. Interesting times, but you have to expect such things. After all, this is China.

The train that we took that night was due to arrive in Lanzhou around 4 am, so we went to sleep as soon as possible, although before I fell completely asleep I got an unsuspected phone call from my mommy, who wanted to know where exactly I was in western China (I hadn’t exactly provided any specifics, and it’s kind of a big place). Unfortunately my phone ran out of minutes before too long, but it wasn’t so bad because I needed to sleep anyway, and there was only one more day of our trip, so it wasn’t too hard to deal without my phone. Hen hao!