Xuzhou, Shanghai and some updates

After we finally got things with our apartment sorted out - and when I say sorted out I mean somewhat as we still don't even have a microwave - we found ourselves in the middle of May holiday. In China, there are essentially three major holidays consisting of five days each. This means that all 1.6 billion people plus in this country travel. Needless to say it's busy. We didn't attempt to do a whole lot. We did go out to Shanghai for a few days. We didn't see much but we we get to one of the good bars.

Then we went to Xuzhou with Chris. Xuzhou isn't even in the Lonely Planet, so there's not a whole lot to say about it. It does have a mountain and a big park and a museum. Of note at the museum were suits of armour made out of like square of thin marble woven together with copper wire. I'm not sure if these suits were ever used - they seem a little impractical because they have pieces covering the eyes, mouth and soles of the feet - or if they were intended to be worn by the dead, though the ones on display had not been worn by any dead people. I think we spent more time on the train than we did there. For Randall that was most of the fun.
On the way there we got a holiday train - a train run only during the holiday to deal with the extra demand. Holiday trains are the lowest priority trains so they have to pull off to the side to let all the other trains go by. So, despite the fact that the trip to Xuzhou is only about four hours, we were on the train for ten - mostly stopped. The way back was much more interesting. We couldn't get tickets back to Wuxi. Everything was full. The trick to getting what you want in China is to be more inconvenient than the person who is inconveniencing you. This is the golden rule of China. Make note. So, I stayed in the line until tickets to Nanjing that didn't exist suddenly existed. Nanjing is about two hours from Wuxi and they have an awesome train station and they're big enough that they pretty much service every town around on a regular basis. Nanjing, being a university town, also has a decent nightlife and a fairly good array of accomodations. So, it's a good second best. The catch, was that the tickets to Nanjing were standing tickets. When you have to stand, you meet more people - other people standing, people who let you sit in there seat while they go get something to eat or other standing people who've managed to get a seat and offer to let you sit for a while. Being the only white people on the train, we immediately had an audience and Chris kept the train entertained for about an hour haggling with a woman on the train selling insoles. We found some english speakers to chat with and one of them had a stool for us to use in the aisle. All in all that part wasn't bad.

From Nanjing, it was no problem to get standing tickets to Wuxi on the next train and though we were all exhausted, we arrived in about two hours - at 4:30 am. Then we slept and spent the next week doing nothing.

Now I'm working, although not terribly hard as I still only have two or three classes a day, despite still having to be here doing nothing for a large portion of the day. Still, I have some time to finally catch up on my blogging and all the tv I missed this past semester...