Back in Beijing, the Fluidity of Plans
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 in: News
I awoke, still on the train. The sun was igniting the thickening sky, which I took to indicate that we were getting closer to the cities. I asked the guy next to me what time it was, and whether we’d reached Xingtai yet. “Oh, we already passed Xingtai, Shijiazhuang is next.” Damnit, I slept through Dan’s stop, and he’d disembarked without getting to say goodbye. After a couple weeks together, I figured I owed him at least that much, in addition to the money I wasn’t able to pull out of the ATM in Xi’an. This would have been made easier with the aid of my phone, but it was useless to worry about that at this point as well.
The train pulled into Beijing around 8 in the morning. I bade the British kids farewell on my way off the train car. The smell of human waste on the tracks a pleasant welcome back to the city. I set off if search of a bus schedule, unwilling to shell out another 60 kuai for my own cab, I figured I could make it on the bus, and found an appropriate route back. An hour and less than 2 kuai later, I dropped my bag in the student lounge and collapsed into the couch. Before passing out, I sent Dan this message since I didn’t get to say it in person:
Dan! I was so upset we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, I fell asleep and when I woke up we were already passing Shijiazhuang. I trust you made it home safe and have spent your day rolling around in the lush greenery behind your house.
Traveling with you was a great pleasure, and at the end we hit some nastiness. And like listening to a beautiful recording of your favorite song with a loud screech at the end, it’s easy to hear that and say it ruined the whole experience. But it didn’t ruin anything, it was just some unpleasantness in an otherwise awesome trip.
And I wouldn’t change anything about it. So thanks.
Megan and I had made plans to go to Qingdao for the International Beer Festival there. Qingdao is the home of Tsingtao, a beer brand founded in 1903 by German settlers. Another bit of language trivia, Qingdao and Tsingtao are the same word, pronounced the same way; Tsingtao is just an old way of transliterating it. Qingdao used to be a concession territory to the Germans, and so the city’s architecture has a decidedly European influence, or so I’m told. Nowadays, Qingdao is one of the most popular beers in China, and this International Beer Festival, started in 1991 is a 16-day Oktoberfest-style celebration, a nod to the city’s German roots. Over 50 brands from around the world come to Qingdao for the event. Amongst the delegation from America is Pabst Blue Ribbon, so you hipster scum can rest assured that only the highest quality beers get represented. We actually didn’t even know about festival until after we picked our destination; we just wanted to go to a nice place on the coast, and the beer festival happened to open the same weekend we booked the hostel. So much for a relaxing weekend at the beach, but we were still happy to trade it in for the drunken antics of 4 million people.
The only problem was that although we had the hostel booked, we didn’t have transportation figured out until I’d returned from my trip with Dan. When I went to the ticket office, the guy laughed and said I should’ve come two weeks in advance, 4 days wasn’t enough notice to get seats on a train to the most popular beer-related event in China on opening weekend. I got standing tickets with the hope of upgrading, but after talking it over with Megan, we decided that it would be too stressful; it’s a 9 hour overnighter, and if we couldn’t upgrade we would be stuck without a seat, which would put a big damper on our first day in Qingdao. She also decided she would have to come back earlier to miss the least amount of school, really only giving us one whole day there. This was seeming more and more like a chore than a vacation.
After I’d canceled the hostel booking and train tickets, I realized that I should have just gone on my own. The main reason for our decision to cancel the trip was that it was seeming less and less likely we would be able to upgrade our tickets, and Megan was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to handle a 9 hour standing ticket. But if the past few days had taught me anything, it was that I could handle just about anything; at that point, I could’ve done a 9 hour train ride standing on my head. Ultimately, I realized this too late to change my mind again. I wasn’t upset at all at the missed opportunity; I still wanted to hang out with her before we went our respective ways, I just had to think of something interesting to do since a few days turned into an entire week in Beijing. As she put it, “If you can’t think of something to do in Beijing, you’re a boring person.”
I hit the guide books, hoping something would jump out at me.
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