Xi'an Hotels
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underbellies
Entry 7 of 20 | show all | print this entry |
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i've mentioned a number of times that the week long national holiday (thankfully soon to be over) makes traveling around more difficult, be it finding a room/bed, buying a train ticket, or trying to enjoy something that has been dissolved in a sea of people. i had managed pretty well...but i ran into difficulty trying to get a train from pingyao to xi'an. i always try to book my own tickets, even if it means going to the station, standing in what passes for a line in china, and then muddling through trying to make myself understood at the ticket window. lots of people just get their hostel/hotel to book tickets for them, paying a fairly hefty commission...but i can't bring myself to pay for things that i can do myself...and i figure that by going to the train station before i need to catch the train i'll familiarize myself with where everything is so that it'll all be easier to manage when it comes time to leave. and so, in pingyao, i walked to the train station and stood in 'line' only to discover that all that was available was standing tickets...for an overnight train ride. for me the whole point of choosing sleeper trains is so that the cost of accommodation is folded into the cost of transportation, and so i'm not using up daylight traveling around. as interesting as watching the countryside go by might be...it's not nine hours interesting. in short, i think traveling at night is both cheap and efficient. i left the train station and walked back to my hostel being not quite sure what i was going to do about the train. i decided to try hitting up the hostel staff...because sometimes they can find tickets in places i wouldn't ever know to look...tickets that are actually worth paying a commission for. sure enough, they found me an overnight sleeper train to xi'an. the commission was 50% of the cost of the ticket, but worth it under the circumstances. the bus (less reliable and less comfortable) was still more expensive than my train ticket even with the commission...i was pretty happy. the ticket arrived at the hostel the next morning and at first i thought that something was wrong because the town listed as the departure station wasn't pingyao. the hostel staff explained to me that it was a ticket that went from the stop after pingyao to xi'an, but that no one would care and i would be able to get on the train at the pingyao station. it felt pretty sketchy, but plausible for china. and sure enough, not one of the officials so much as blinked as i handed my ticket around. mission accomplished.
i'm in xi'an now. i'm staying at a hostel that's affiliated with the hostels that i stayed at in both beijing and pingyao...and i've come to realize the appeal of frequenting places well worn by other backpackers. as well as sorting out my train ticket problem, the hostel in pingyao reserved me a bed in xi'an and arranged for me to be picked up at the train station by hostel staff. the customer service at the chinese hostels geared towards foreign backpackers beats anything i ever came across in india. and after the time i spent in the north-east (where few backpackers go) i can see the contrast between services for westerners and services for chinese tourists. some independent chinese travelers (usually young chinese, older folks seem to stick to the package tours) seem to have figured this out and use the western geared hostels as well.
thinking about it, i probably don't really have enough to write about yet to be creating a new entry (i see the terracotta warriors tomorrow), but i think what caused me to want to write was something that happened in the pingyao train station last night. as i was waiting i had noticed two woman and a child of about three, mostly because the child was spitting all his chewed food out and handing it back to the woman holding him, who i assumed to be his mother. my attention wandered, as it does when in waiting rooms, and i forgot about them. then, just as my train was called, two men walked in. one had on an official looking jacket, maybe police but i couldn't tell from where i was. nothing else about him looked official, and even the jacket looked a bit tattered. they walked up to the two women and the child and an argument broke out. the man wearing the jacket promptly hit the woman holding the child full in the face while the other man ripped the child out of her hands and started carrying him out of the train station. the assaulted woman burst into tears while the man who had hit her shook her and held her back, and then left to follow the man who had taken the child. another man sitting beside them (who i hadn't noticed until this point) jumped up and started running after the men but he was held back by the two woman. he broke free and ran out of the station, chasing after the men and the child. i wasn't sure what i had just witnessed. was the child kidnapped by his father (or possible father...was the man who was sitting with the women the father...was the paternity in doubt?) was the man wearing the jacket acting in an official capacity or a personal capacity? what shocked me the most was the sense of disinterest that permeated the room. neither of the station guards intervened or seemed to care and no one reacted in any visible way except to turn their heads and watch. the violence struck me as barbaric and alien at first...until i realize that similar things happen in canada all the time...maybe not in a train station and maybe not as brazenly...but what i had witnessed was hardly 'chinese'. i would like to think that if something like that had happened in the cobourg train station people would have reacted to it differently...but probably not. still...i can't shake the sense that i'd witnessed a degree of disregard for the lives of the people whose personal business had been so jarringly put on display that i think can only exist in a place where life is very crowded...and very cheap.
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