从北京到宜昌

Sammie and I arose at 6:45 so that we wouldn’t be scrambling around trying to do everything at the last minute.  When we got to the Sydney airport and went to the Malaysia Airlines counter to check in we were told that we owed $600 in excess baggage fees.  I knew my bags were a little overweight but I didn’t think that it deserved that kind of honor.  One bag weighed 21 kilos, and the other 28.  After arguing with the lady at the counter I learned, to my horror, that she meant I was only allowed 20 kilos TOTAL, not per bag.  That’s like a pair of shoes and two pairs of jeans.  Sammie and I scrambled over to an empty space and started throwing things out of my bag right and left, after wrenching open the broken zipper and praying that I wouldn’t ruin it beyond repair.  We threw all the books and heavy things we could manage into my dirty laundry bag and I sent those home with her, so she can ship them to me by boat later, and made our second of many trips back to the ticket counter.  Eventually we got my bags down to a fee of $325 and I gave in and paid it because I only had about 10 more minutes to dig through them, and to live in a place for a year, it’s miserable without certain things like warm clothes.

Upon arriving in Malaysia I finally located my gate through all the construction only to discover that it had been changed from C16 to H10, so I had to hop on a tram to get to the other building, which was no trouble since I had four hours to kill.  My online itinerary listed my total travel time (including layovers in Kuala Lampur) as 8 hours and 30 minutes.  My first flight was 8 hours and 5 minutes, plus another 4 hours in Malaysia before a six hour flight to Beijing.  According to the website I was to leave at 2pm Sydney time, and arrive at 8:30am Sydney time, yet only travel for 8 ½ hours.  I wonder what kind of education you need to figure the math for that company.

Descending into Beijing I watched the world go grayer as I bid farewell to the sun and felt my spirits fade with the colours.  Getting through customs and on a bus to the train station was much easier than I had anticipated, which is not something I get to say often living here.  I was feeling really proud of my Chinese-speaking abilities because I communicated quite well while in Beijing, but I realized when I got to Yichang why I was able to understand people so easily.  They were actually speaking Putonghua instead of some hick mixture of dialect and Chinese.  As soon as I got to Yichang I lost my ability to understand what people were saying to me.

I made it to the train station and was reminded yet again about the kindness of Chinese people.  Two girls stopped what they were doing to help me drag my bags to the ticket counter when they saw me struggling with all my earthly possessions.  They didn’t speak any English but still helped me buy my train ticket and lug my junk around.  It warmed my somewhat exhausted heart.  I was really bummed to hear the guy at the ticket counter say that they were all out of sleeping tickets, but I bought a sitting ticket anyway because I had to teach Monday (I thought), with hopes that I could bribe someone on the train to sell me a sleeper.

If you’ve ever ridden on a train in China you know that the chairs were specifically engineered (by a fella named Lucifer) to provide the utmost discomfort.  22 hours of everybody trying to outshout/outsmoke each other can really drain the energy you began with, if there was any.  Then there are the people who all think that everybody wants to listen to their music…at once.  I got so desperate for sleep that I tried to lay down on the floor, which ranks in the top 25 filthiest surfaces since time began.  Even that degrading effort was wasted, so I settled for wondering who came up with koo-koo-ka-choo first, the Beatles or Simon and Garfunkel?

As tired as a person can be, I fell into my apartment a full two days after I left Australia and was greeted by air-conditioning, ice cold water in the fridge, and candy on the table.  It pays to give my friends the key to my apartment when I’m gone!  My friends Zack and Elizabeth knew the perfect way to lift my spirits after a grueling journey.  I got my teaching schedule and found out I have another week to get ready, so I didn’t have to rush home from Beijing quite so fast, but it will give me time to kill all the cockroaches and catch up on some rest.

“It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne