In China, the trains do run on time

After visiting Olympic park and Dong’s parents, we headed to the Beijing West station to catch the train. Being Friday, rush hour started early, further clogging congested Beijing while we tried to rush to the station. Running through the train station Dong called Maggie, a friend of Erik’s who would accompany us to Xi’an. Apparently, she was at the wrong train station, Dong mistakenly told her Beijing main station instead of Beijing West. We rushed to the terminal anyway to try to catch our train, but they stop boarding 5 minutes prior to departure and we arrived 4 minutes prior to departure. While Dong and his wife Shaoli (Qaoli?) could have bribed the official, since they were with foreigners they were not able to bribe the comrade gate keeper (actually many hotels also refused us later on because they did not allow foreigners to stay).

Missing the train was especially unfortunate because we made the mistake of traveling during the Dragon Boat Festival (travel date was limited by Dong's Visa appointment). Being one of the few periods of vacation many Chinese get during the year mean that the station was packed with people trying to get trains anywhere out of Beijing. Buying train tickets in China is especially complicated because you have to buy them 10 days in advance at the train station from where you were departing. This meant Dong reserved hard seats for us a week ago, and had a friend of a friend of a scalper hold return tickets for us in Xi’an. 

This is the line we were confronted with to try to change our tickets. The boards slowly flashed less and less seats until they were all gone, to everywhere. That includes hard and soft sleepers, hard and soft seats, and standing room only. Luckily since there are absolutely no rules in China the person at the counter did a manual override for no apparent reason and we got standing room on a train out of Beijing later that night. This also allowed Maggie to come to the West station from the main station, so she could accompany us on the journey after all. 

This is standing room only. 

Eventually we sat and slept on the floor of the aisle for the 14 hour overnight train ride. Multiple carts passing through selling food complicated things, as did garbage collection which leaked some foul fluid all over Comrade Erik.