We had a really rough night. Since Ada was playing with the air conditioner remote control yesterday, I took out the batteries. When I put them back in, we didn’t notice that the settings were reset, and now the air conditioner was set to cooling. We woke up in the middle of the night freezing, and fought with the remote, that had only Chinese on it, to get it back to heating. After an hour, we finally got it, but Julia didn’t trust the temperature settings, so she left it on the highest temperature. It was hard for both of us to fall back asleep, and of course, we woke up melting a couple of hours later. I lowered the temperature back, but soon after it was time to get up.
It was super early, and we were exhausted from the night. We finished packing quickly and Tize knocked on our door. Outside, Sanda was waiting in his taxi to drive us to the train station. It was sad to leave Xingxian. Tize’s family is so nice and warm to us, and they’re super chill about everything. It’s a very noticeable difference from what we experienced with the Chengdu-based side of the family.
It was 6:45 in the morning, and we were about to get through the little carousel thing to the railway station. With us there were maybe eight more people. There was plenty of time until the train was supposed to leave. And yet, those eight people were trying to cut in front of us to the carousel. I blocked them with the stroller, but when I looked back, I saw that one of them managed to squeeze himself in the same slot as Sanda, and another on with the same slot as Tize. “What’s the rush?” I asked Tize, “Why does everybody push and try to cut you in line all the time?”. “It’s a way of life.” Tize reply. I like Tize a lot. He has many qualities that I appreciate, but he doesn’t really have a sense of humor, which somehow made this response even funnier to me.
But I guess he’s right. Everybody will try to cut you off and get there first (wherever “there” is), even in situations where it makes no difference at all. And I got tired of it. In our case, this is not just rude, it disrupts how we travel: when you enter a train station here, first you present your ticket and ID. For most people, this works with an automatic gate where you stick your ticket in a slot, scan your ID, and the gate opens. We need to find the gate that has a person next to it who checks our passports. Julia leads with our passports and tickets and manages the conversation, and once we pass the inspection, I follow with Ada in her stroller. When somebody tries to jam themselves between us, everybody gets confused. This, of course, happened this morning, so I simply shoved the guy out of the way. Fuck him.
Then you put your luggage through the screening machine. Julia put our luggage, and some woman ran past me and put her luggage right on the conveyer belt. I took it off the conveyer belt and put my backpack instead. She mumbled something in protest, but hey – fuck her.
The train from Xingxian to Taiyuan takes 4 hours. It’s the regular train with the terrible seats. However, it went by pretty fast, and when we got to Taiyuan we took a taxi to the bullet train station. I am getting better at blocking people from cutting me off, mostly using Ada’s stroller.
I also noticed that accessibility is not really a consideration in China. When we travel, I almost always have to carry the stroller with Ada in it on and off the train, down to the subway, and into tourist attractions. The bullet train terminal in Taiyuan, for example, has two levels: the main level, and the shopping level that is mostly for dining. The only way to get up to the shopping level is with the escalators. There’s no elevator. Being the terrible parents that we are, we took the stroller up on the escalator to have lunch.
Julia says her Chinese is not great, and usually I find that hard to believe, but then she orders food for us and we end up with three huge bowls of soup:
Then we boarded. Even though there’s plenty of time to board and everybody has their assigned seat, hundreds of people stormed the automatic gates. However, we looked for the gate with the person next to it, which for some reason nobody else realized they can use too. As soon as Julia started to talk to the lady at the gate, people stormed that gate as well. I blocked them with the stroller and moved the bag that some lady shoved between Julia and me out of the way. She’ll need that bag when she goes to fuck herself. Then, to get to the train itself, one can either take the escalators, or, finally, an elevator. We went in and some guy in his 60s ran in as well, ramming me and the stroller with his suitcase. I yelled at him “baobao!” (“baby!”) and he mumbled in Chinese that he only touched the strollers handles and gave a demonstration. I don’t understand Chinese, so I shoved him and told him in Hebrew that if doesn’t touch the stroller again we’ll get along just fine. Hey, don’t judge me - he was probably only in his early 60s.
I think I wrote about it in the blog last time we travelled here. People don’t mind aggression as long it’s the type of the aggression they know. If their aggression is met by a different kind of aggression, like mine, for instance, they only see mine, not theirs. I don’t care. Fuck them. Fuck them all.
After another 3 hours we were finally in Beijing. We took a taxi to the hotel and checked in. This hotel is really nice, and we totally deserve it after the last one. Ada was amazing this entire day, and we felt bad that she had to be locked in train cars and strapped in her seat for so many hours today, so we wanted to find her a mall with an indoor playground, but it turned out that we’re in the wrong part of town for that. We’re in Gulou, which is an older part of the city, but it’s very trendy here. So, we walked over to Shichahai, an area of small streets with souvenir shops and bars that are very similar to the ones we saw in Chengdu on our previous visit: all the bars had young musicians, usually one or two, playing live music. This was not what we needed, though. We turned around and found an awesome BBQ place, where they cook your food in front of you on a cast iron griddle. Julia, as she often does, ordered too much food:
But it was great, and we did a good job eating it.
Then we came back to the hotel early enough to let Ada crawl around and release some energy.
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