Chickety China, Part 2: 5 hour delay and no hot water

Upon our arrival to Qingdao, Janetta and I asked which bus would take us to the train station, waited for Albert (our new South African acquaintance) and walked to the bus stop. Albert and Janetta needed change for the bus, so we went to the convenience stores near buy and made the store owners a bit upset by cleaning out their small bills. Qingdao is not a place I would recommend visiting. The only thing to do there is tour the Tsingtao brewery. The city is huge, but dusty and kind of boring. It feels a lot more like a small town than a big city in that it's got no real entertainment or cafes in which to pass the time. How do I know this if I was just going to take a train out?

Albert got the last spot on the bus that came by (argh) and the bus pulled away before Janetta and I could try to squeeze on. We got on the next bus and met up with Albert at the train station, he had planned on taking the night train into Beijing but the window attendant on the west side of the train station just gave him the soonest ticket out of Qingdao to Beijing (the joys of language barriers). I'd printed up the train schedule and underlined the train Janetta and I wanted (it was the same one Albert had a ticket for), the 11am train. The attendant gave us tickets for the 5pm. When we tried pointing to the 12, 2, and 4 trains she just pointed at the 5pm. A man behind us, helped us clarify the matter and told us all other trains were sold out. WTF? It had been mere minutes since Albert had purchased his ticket. Janetta and I were kind of miffed, especially since I'd checked a couple different sites to see if I could book the tickets in advance and had had no luck. Albert hadn't even wanted to leave Qingdao that early.

Whatever, we made the best of it. There was a coffee shop (over priced, yes) in the train station, so we settled down at the 'SPR Coffee' with a coffee (me) and a Tsingtao (Janetta) and started to plan a bit about how we had to shift our schedule and where to look for food in this dusty, large port city. We had another drink and asked the young Chinese guy (who spoke English) working the register if we could leave our stuff in the store room since there weren't any lockers in the station--yes, a blind leap of faith on our part. The owner/manager/boss was an older, middle-aged woman and she kept asking us to sit down and relax (that was the extent of her English). They agreed and Janetta and I walked off, a little less weighed down, to find a place to eat.

The plaza of the East side of the train station looks out onto an intersection with 5ish spokes, and we just started walking down the closest one. We wondered for a couple blocks and found a restaurant that looked a little pricey, so we went across the street to the restaurant advertising cheaper prices. I whipped out my Vegan Passport and turned to the page with the Chinese translation of what vegans do and do not eat. We should have looked around the restaurant first, there was an awesome looking lunch buffet for only a few Yuan but it was hidden behind a divider wall. Instead, we just pointed at what looked good (the server showed me the veggie section of the menu--OMG a veggie section!). We ended up with super oily potatoes and peppers for me and deep fried pork bits for Janetta. We decided to take our time at the next restaurant we visited, despite the servers habits of hovering over us like we should know the menu and be ready to order.

After eating our slightly disappointing lunch, we walked around the block. There were shops with all kinds of awesome looking fruit- one had Dragonfruit, which I have yet to try fresh. The craziest thing about this area were the clotheslines going from lamp post to street sign to whatever else. Businesses were using these street clothing lines to dry sheets and towels and residents were drying clothing.

We went back to SPR and found the folks sitting and eating, the guy rushed to the back room and promptly brought us our bags (everything still inside, see, people can be trusted sometimes) and asked us to sit down. We were given some water (hot, all water is boiled in China since it's not safe otherwise) to sip on while we waited for our train to board at 5pm.

I was surprised to find out that Google did work on the computer at the coffee shop, and it was a good thing too because I had to email our hostel to let them know there was a delay in our arrival time.

The train was full (but no standing seats on this one, more on that in the entry on the train ride back) so we sat, read, napped and looked at the packaged food for sale in the "cafe." My favorite name was Jew's Ear Juice, but we saw things ranging from Trail Mix to Duck Tongue to Fried Tofu strips. It was a nice ride through the Chinese countryside.

We got into Beijing at 11:30pm, it was a long day. With some help from an English speaking Chinese man, Janetta and I got a cab from the Beijing South Train Station to Leo's Hostel. We checked in and looked forward to a hot shower and a place to sleep.