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.

Chickety China, Part 1: On the Boat to China

September 18th: Departure Day
A beautiful, crisp, blue-skied, autumn Saturday in Korea! The weather had just changed to something I've been craving, and now I had to leave. Oh well, on the bright side, today was a travel day, so I was going to spend most of it walking to the bus and on the boat. I finished packing (yes, the day I leave and I'm still packing), and double checked the gas and hot water were off and all the electronics were unplugged, then went downstairs to do meet up with Janetta to begin our journey to Beijing.

We had a short Metro ride from Bupyeong to Dongincheon, and the plan was to catch one of the two buses that would take us to the Incheon International Port. We had a bit of difficulty tracking down which exit from the Dongincheon Underground Market (read: Dongincheon Labyrinth) would take us to the correct bus stop, but we eventually found our way and flagged down a young Korean man (most high school and uni students have some English skills and we had a tiny bit of Korean knowledge) to help us figure out if we were on the right side of the road--we weren't. It was back under the street to cross over to the correct side--Asia loves underground crosswalks, which would be awesome if the streets were in a grid and the crossings went directly across the street every time. We followed the folks with suitcases and eventually found the port.

Walking up to the main building of the port, Janetta pointed out that tons of people were moving things out of suitcases and into boxes then leaving the suitcases in stacks off to the side. It was pretty crazy. We passed a couple of older men (probably nearing 90) carrying stacks of boxes coming to three times their size on their backs secured with straps made of packing tape. Sadly, we couldn't get a good picture of this impressive looking display, but we did get some photos of the cargo swapping action.


Then it was time to queue. We stood in a "line" (read: a mob that split off at different windows) for about an hour to get our actual tickets and room assignments. After the madness of defensive queuing (pushing and line cutting aren't uncommon in Korea and are regular practice in China), we had to get Janetta a re-entry visa since South Africans are only issued single entry visas, even if it's a year-long work visa, unless multi-entry is requested; Americans are automatically granted multi-entry for work visas as far as I understand it.

So, it was more waiting. This time, we were able to sit in a hallway that wasn't crowded and munch on some Asian pear slices. The visa process didn't take much time, so that helped. At this point, Janetta hadn't eaten in quite a while (she had to take a bus for about an hour to meet me at the Metro station near my house and had only had some grapes for breakfast at 9ish--it was about 2pm by the time the visa was processed and we had our tickets), so we headed to E Mart and McDonalds.

I had heard on Alien's Day Out, a blog by a vegan in Korea, that E Mart had Purely Decadent Soy Ice Cream. It's true! Calorie counting be damned, I had me (well, I shared with Janetta) a pint of Chocolate Brownie Almond and it was delicious! We bought some snackage for the ferry and Janetta ate at McDonald's.

We got on the ferry and explored a bit, it was like having a 3 star hotel on the water, things were clean but not fancy. The ferry also had a restaurant, bar, karaoke room and duty free shop. We were rooming with two young Chinese women (we paid to get a 4 sleeper instead of the room o'bunks--First Class, baby!) there was a mini-fridge with complimentary bottled water and a nice little table in the room. It was nice to have space to walk around and the option to sleep if we wanted. I recommend the ferry to those on a budget and with a little more time (it takes 15 hours to get from Incheon to Qingdao).


Janetta and I met another South African teaching English in Korea, Albert, he was also on his way to Beijing via train from Qingdao. Albert lives on one of the Islands to the west of Incheon and is planning to move to France to live with his girlfriend. This was just the first English teacher we met on our epic journey of epicness.

We got to Qingdao intact.