China is kinda retarded in how it does its holidays.... right now... EVERYONE is on vacation... they have two sets of vacation in the year.. winter right after spring festival.. and then summer at the beginning or end of August. So... all forms of transportation are pretty crowded and buying tickets can be tough sometimes... so i got Alice from ReachHigh to go with me to get the train tickets.... and of course they were all sold out until the 12th.... so we changed routes a bit...
Tuesday morning at 7:30.... Train .... Songyuan to Changchun. 2.5 hours.
Tuesday night at 10:20..... Sleeper train... Changchun to Dalian. 8.5 hours.
These were the tickets Aliced helped me get... not bad.. it got us to Dalian... and then from Dalian we can take an 8 hour boat ride to Weihai.... the only problem.. gotta buy the tickets when we get to Dalian.... but I actually was able to handle that part pretty well. Also when we got to Dalian we bought our return tickets home from Dalian to Songyuan for the 13th.
Sleeper Train.
Not really that much to say about the sleeper train. We made sure to get bottom bunk... so that we can actPost Optionsually sit down when not wanting to sleep... middle and top bunk don't have enough room to sit in the bunk. We got on the train found our bunk.. asked a random person what time we would get to Dalian... then pretty much passed out... it had been a pretty long day of wondering around Changchun with our bags.
The Boat
When we got to Dalian at about 7 in the morning we took a taxi to the boat station and bought tickets to Weihai.... for a boat that left at 8:30 that same morning... grabbed some quick breakfast and a few snacks and were on the boat. We bought 4th class tickets... but the boat wasn't very crowded... so it seemed like they moved everyone into 2nd and 3rd class.. and had 4th and 5th class closed off... we got "seats" when we got on the boat... we ended up in a room with 4 old ladies... which wasn't to bad.. they slept pretty much the whole time (so did chris)(each room had 6 beds)... and i spent most of my time outside watching the water.... I love being on boats...... the boat ride was pretty nice and a lot of fun.
While I was sitting outside one of the workers came up and sat next to me for awhile.... he was like a manager or something... he we pretty good at keeping the conversation decently simple... he introduced me to another one of the workers that was standing near kinda trying to listen but she was pretty shy... he getting her to introduce herself... it was pretty funny. The guy went back inside at one point.. but obviously not far...because she was facing inside I think talking to him... when I heard my name... I turned around and looked at her and she looked at me and ran inside. So for the next like 2 hours while I was wondering around the boat.... I would randomly here her call my name... and then she would disappear into some random part of the boat..... it was weird.
By about 1pm.... all the people that worked on the boat (even the person that was selling snacks behind the counter) were gone.... just disappeared.... I guess it was rest time. Then when we got close to land... they all showed back up again and helped everyone get off the boat and stuff. It was a really nice boat ride... and I got to read a lot.
Next post:
At Weihai
Post that need to be made:
The Bike Adventure with Alice
The Rock Show/My first performance in China
My Reach High Students
I'm so glad you got to take a boat ride, Abi. That type of relaxation lasts a while. Sounds like a fun trip so far. Did the school change the schedule so that two of you were off at exactly the same time from beginning to end or do you still have a staggered schedule -- Chris returning to work a week before you?
ReplyDeleteJoy school changed the time of its vacation by one week... so Simon moved my vacation to the same time as Chris's so that me and Chris would both be there when all the schools opened back up. Though the more I am here the more I realize it doesn't matter. Simon carefully planned out the vacations to that there would pretty much always be at least two teachers around, and then Adam was like...eee I am leaving about half a week earlier, and Justen and his wife (who works at Reach High) decided they wanted to take two extra weeks before Justen's vacation off as well... which made last week VERY busy for all of us.... but it works out. So ya.. if we want to take unpaid vacation we just kinda do it.
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