You can never assess a whole country by the first city you visit, especially if it is a big city, a capital city. Beijing may be nothing like anywhere else in China, but it was a welcome surprise.
If you’ve read my earlier post on the train in Laos, you’ll remember that my encounter with the Chinese man on that train left me somewhat deflated. If there was anywhere I’d have expected his predictions of doom and gloom to come true, I would have expected it to be in Beijing.
His biggest takeaway, and one that I couldn’t refute at the time hinged around the language problem. Of course I didn’t know ANY Chinese and of course not that many people outside of the hotels speak English, but ‘Translate’ on the phone is amazing. I’d come across ardent proponents during the course of our journey, but my tentative attempts to use it always ended in a muddle, or as in Cambodia - language not available. I gave up on it.
What encouraged me to give it another go was a taxi driver in Bali. He just mumbled away into his phone as he drove us back from Nusa Dua and passing his phone back with the translation. I had never thought to talk into it for the translation. Then again all the frustrations I’ve had in the past just trying to get Siri to send a two line message whilst I was driving, there’s no way I could have believed that I could speak a sentence into my phone in even a softened scots accent and have it translated into Chinese. Although when I think back, it did sometimes seem as if that was what Siri was trying to do. It certainly didn’t convert my spoken English words into comprehensible English text.
I had some real conversations without either of us speaking the others language. I was able even to raise a few laughs. Not only that, you can even switch it to a camera mode in the App and point it to signs and menus, give the character recognition a few seconds and it displays it in English.
It wasn’t just the translation App, most of the people we met in Beijing were patient and friendly. And we were never asked for a selfie.
There were frustrations and culture shocks that I’d rather not talk about, but in the end we were wishing we had more time in Beijing and realising that three weeks is just not enough time for a place as vast as China.
We’re on the road again and I’m writing this at 244mph (that’s the train, not my typing speed) and hope to post it before we get off. We’re doing an unplanned stopover in Lanzhou and getting the train to Zhangye tomorrow. We had booked an overnight train with Trip.com and it said that they would keep trying until 8am on the day of departure. Even just the slim possibility of finding out we might not have ticket just a few hours before we were due to travel, that sounded crazy. In a pannick I looked at all the other possibilities and they all looked grim.
It looked like a flight, but they all had long layovers and cost a lot. It was only when I looked into the layovers that Lanzhou showed up. I didn’t think much of our chances of getting a ticket the day before departure as they often sell out soon after release, but with lots of slots on that route we were able to get a First Class ticket on a train at a reasonable time of day. We arrive at 21:30 after about an eight hour journey and we managed to book a hotel. We continue on with another 4hour train journey at noon tomorrow. Safely booked already.
In the end it will probably turn out to be more comfortable than the original 18hr overnight train arriving in Zhangye at 4am would have been.
Now lets just hope the hotel bar is still open.
