Trains in China

We’ve taken a few trains in China now. Three times to be precise, together roughly 60 hours of train rides. I thinks its nice to share a little bit of our train experience in China. The first two trains were Soft Sleepers, that is what they call the luxury ride in China cause hey, I like to travel comfortable. But in the last train we had 3 hours delay (while riding) which caused us to miss our connecting train.

Normally this would be no biggy, but in China there are simply too many people (over a billion) and not enough trains. This caused us to have a standing place and to fight for a seating place if one came up. One thing I can assure you: Chinese, young, old, cripple, pregnant (or 2M tall) whatsoever. It does not matter, you shall fight for a place to sit or stand for 8 hours!! This basically meant we had to stand for quite some time until we could conquer a seat. Then comes the next issue. How to keep the seat?! Two old men literally pushed Lea off her seat until she stood up. She lost the match and they smiled nicely and laughed a little. Another men just sat down on Ninas lap when she didn’t give him the seat.

There were so many people, that everyone was pushing others in the seats. So 3 seats turned into 4 or 5 with two or three children on top. Crazy!

Finally, after 3 hours we also got seats, which we had to share also with a couple Chinese - personal space does not exist. They will sit half on your lap until you give them that centimeter to sit on. We were the only foreigners on that train so the Chinese tried very hard to make us give up our seats. Every 5 minutes someone else came, waving with their cards and saying it was their seat. Luckily, Tom figured them out very quickly. So we kept on ignoring them.

It’s not only the amount of people in the train, it’s the sound they make and the smell. Also every 5 minutes a food carriage had to get passed all  the people standing to sell smelly train food. Crazy crazy crazy – but yes, another Chinese experience!