fast times at the Guangzhou train station

Lonely Planet China describes the main train station in Guangzhou as anarchic, seething mass of humanity, so on my way I prepared myself for the worst. What greeted me when I arrived was not what I expected. I expected a train station - seething or not, I expected it to be ... indoors. As I walked up the stairs from the subway station, the first thing I saw was people just sitting around everywhere, with their bags all around them. And then I turned the corner, and saw that an entire football field size square was filled with people. They appeared to be forming long lines, just to get in the station. I got in one of them, but after a few minutes I got close enough to see that the main at the front of the line was checking tickets. Which I didn't have. My plan was to get to the station and try to figure out how to buy a ticket, but now it appeared that I couldn't enter the station without a ticket?! The old Catch-22. I started looking around for clues.

A large neon sign in Chinese pointed further down the road. I wondered if it meant "tickets thataway"? I looked up the word for tickets in the Lonely Planet book and sure enough, one of the symbols matched up - piao! It's pyo in Korean, easy to remember. Got on over there - it was a separate building entirely - only to be greeting with about 30 lines of people, each about 30 people deep. I got in one. And it was at that moment that I realized that out of all the people waiting to buy tickets, all the people getting on their trains or waiting outside, I was the ONLY foreigner. Well, well.

Long lines can be frustrating I guess, but they are a truly wonderful thing for a person who has been in China for just a little over an hour, and has no idea what he's going to say when he gets to the front of that line. I thumbed through my Lonely Planet's phrase section, trying to think of possible lines of conversation. My previous strategy of opening up the book to a page where Guilin - my destination city - was writting in large enough print in Chinese to be read over a ticket counter, wasn't going to cut it here. I tried that first at an information desk before I got up to the train station / giant square / picnic area, and sensing my weakness, a Chinese man pushed past me, completely INTO the little window in the glass separating us from the info guy, and shoved money at the ticket man for Lord knows what purpose. No, I needed to control this conversation. So I practiced. "Wo yao qu Guilin", I want to go to Guilin, under my breathe, over and over again. I memorized it. Okay what could go wrong? What if the train's booked for today? I looked up the word for today and tomorrow. The guy behind me was already fidgeting his bags and making little frustrated snorting noises, no doubt anticipating the avalanche of awkwardness the foreigner ahead of him was bound to unleash. As I mouthed phrases, I imagined he was mentally preparing his best money shove maneuvers. But I was gonna be ready for this guy.

Just then, the line surged ahead as a family of six got their tickets, and I was close enough to hear bits of the conversation with the customer just ahead of me. I couldn't hear what he said, but I could make out the ticket lady say "may-oh" which I remembered from my Mandarin podcasts as the absolute kiss of death. "There isn't any", or "I don't have any" is basically what it means. And it hit me - not surprising, right? There were easily over 500 people getting tickets with me RIGHT NOW, and that was just this instant. Was it always like this? Had I stumbled in during ticket rush hour? How were we all going to fit on trains together? Who knows. But the guy in front of me got some kind of ticket at any rate, and it was finally my turn. What was the word for "tomorrow" again??

Time slowed down. Control the conversation!

"Wo yao qu Guilin."
"Jintian?"
I know that one, it means today! I nodded and she pointed at the computer screen which showed the time of the train's departure at 18:04, the overnight train which I wanted, and the price of 215 yuan (380 was the price a ticket agency had tried to rip me off with early that day!). I gave her the money, she gave me the ticket. No problem! I turned around and headed out of the building, past the lines and people who looked a little surprised that they didn't get to see a funny foreigner show. Thanks Lonely Planet!! I realize all of that could have been a very long Lonely Planet commercial. :)

I expected China to be pretty much what I encountered at the train station - disorganized, dissheveled, out of control and reined in by the authorities (those lines outside were bordered by fences and patrolled by policemen), and smelly. Public toilets are often just ditches built into the floor overflowing with - well you get the idea, they don't look or smell like they're EVER cleaned. But that's where the "backwards" China ends. Walking around the streets, I see nothing but people with expensive looking handbags, fashionable clothes, fast food restaurants, ice cream shops, everything you'd expect to see anywhere in the developed world. The internet cafe I'm sitting in right now has a lightning fast computer w/ webcam, big red executive chairs, and everyone's playing Counterstrike and World of Warcraft around me and watching pirated movies while Chinese hiphop and American dance music plays in the background. But then again, people spit out food right onto the table while they're eating (nope, no napkins). They throw boiled eggs at monkeys at the zoo (saw that today - so sad!! the monkey was happy though) and they throw their trash on the ground EVERYwhere. As an American, its so strange that these two kinds of things exist together - but hey, that's just my perspective I guess. People say that China's going to be modern in the next couple of years, but - disregarding those things I mentioned - China is modern RIGHT NOW.

Pictures will follow - the computer I was using in Hong Kong was super slow and crashed in the middle of a picture upload, and this one won't recognize my camera for some reason. Tomorrow I'm taking a riverboat cruise down the river Li and staying in Yangshuo for a few days, hopefully I'll find a better computer there.