I’M ON A TRAIN AND IT’S MOVING FAST AND

(Note: This post is actually from August 12th-- I wrote it on the internetless train and then neglected to post it. Updated updates coming soon!) 

Hayley: It’s like we’re on the Harry Potter train!!

Gabe: Only a lot worse.

It is hard to express how little space there is right now. Currently, I’m in a compartment whose size Gabe has aptly compared to a “slightly-richer-than-average-girl’s closet.” And right now, aside from the two of us, there are five other people in here too. There are six beds, stacked three high on each side of the compartment with just enough space for a person to pass in between them. I’m on my top bunk right now (right about where the slightly-richer-than-average girl’s spare sheets would go), and there is certainly not enough room to sit up, so I am writing this lying on my back, nestled among all of my earthly possessions. 14 hours down (most of them spent asleep, rocked by the surprisingly soothing jostling of the train). 10 to go.

But, really, I'm just happy we're on this train at all, given that I left packing until the last second and then sort of almost made us miss our train (SORRY GUYS). It was raining when we left Beijing, and it was really only due to the kindness of some of our CET buddies (THANK YOU KARUNA AND KELLIE) that we got ourselves and our absurd amount of luggage into cabs and to the train station before our train, you know, left.

To explain: we’re on our way from Beijing to Hong Kong, upon which all the Yale-China fellows, first- and second-year, are converging for teacher training and bonding and merriment before we all split off to our different sites. It turns out Hong Kong is a LONG WAY AWAY. LIKE 24 HOURS ON A TRAIN. We haven’t actually secured substantial food so far this morning, so we’ve been subsisting on:

1.     The three extremely fuzzy peaches we bought off of the fruit cart last night

2.     A small package of dried pineapple I bought last week

3.     Some horrifying crumbly plastic-wrapped sausages labeled only “Muslim food” which Alex brought and I refuse to touch

4.     Gum

And I can’t speak for Gabe, but I am having a great time on this train, personal boundary / hunger issues aside.  We’ve so far been able to take part in some pretty fun train activities OH MY GOD I just remembered I have candy in my bag hang on hang on hang on hang on. OK, ahhhh, much better. Where was I? Yes, ok, train activities. We’ve been passing around The Phantom Tollbooth, best book of all, currently in Hayley’s possession, and soon I’ll get to reread it. Last night before bed the four of us played some cards, to the extreme amusement of the drunk guys next to us, who kept yelling “MONEY!!” out of apparent disappointment that our game of gin rummy had no stakes. And Alex brought forty balloon-animal-balloons with him, so we spent the morning trying to figure out how to make balloon dogs, to the extreme amusement of the six-year-old Chinese girl on the bunk across from Gabe who is endlessly entertained by the waiguoren (foreigners) who’ve invaded her family’s train compartment. We are really killing it on this train.

Thank you, by the way, for the good vibes I received right before my speech competition—I felt an overwhelming surge of fortitude in the moments right before I had to speak, and I have only you to thank. If you’ve spoken to my father recently, you’ll know that I won a bronze medal! What you probably won’t know is that I tied for third out of seven competitors total. NEVER BEFORE HAS THE WORLD SEEN SUCH A CHAMPION, etc. But it was miraculous even to fill 5 minutes with grammatically coherent Chinese, and I’m just happy that I managed physically to get through the experience without tu­-ing (you can probably figure that one out)(it means vomming).  

It’s actually sort of mindblowing to look back on the summer in Beijing—over the past 8 weeks, we made our way through the Chinese textbook I used (and then forgot) over my entire senior year of high school. And then we went through an entire new, longer textbook as well. We’ve learned something like 650 vocabulary words, and probably 1000 characters or more. And, most unbelievable of all, we can kind of speak and understand Chinese. Kind of. Meaning if we are in a familiar situation (cab, restaurant) and nothing is going horribly wrong, we can usually figure out how to communicate what we want.

Some situations are still too hard for us to manage with our dignities intact. Like the post office. Even though there was an entire chapter of our book dedicated to post office vocabulary (at which I scoffed at the time: Post offices, HAHA, who uses them anyway, WRONG), every time we go in there we manage to get every postal employee in the joint laughing at us, as for example, we repacked the entire contents of one of Alex’s suitcases into tiny cardboard boxes on the floor of the post office. We’ve agreed to disagree as to whether whipping out his magic set (conveniently located at the top of the suitcase) made matters worse or better.

But I guess if there’s one thing I’ve learned over this summer in Beijing it is that laughing, sometimes hysterically, at your own incompetence is often the only way to bear it. Especially in a situation like ours, in which incompetence is utterly inescapable. You might get weak alcohol in orange bowls instead of hot and sour soup because you got the characters mixed up. You might ask what time your friends want to eat manure. You might announce to your class that, at your university, you live in a backpack. You might accidentally ask your roommate’s mother on skype if she thinks you are sexy (disclaimer: only 2/4 of these were me). It is a little freeing, for a fairly type-A Yalie, to accept these mistakes and embarrassments as an inevitable part of daily life.

On we go, to Hong Kong, where we’ll be back to zero with the language thing. And I’m going to find some food on this train if it is the last thing I do. ONWARD!