“Esteemed passenger friends, this concludes our broadcasts for the time being. It is now time for your afternoon rest. Please avoid disturbing the peace of the passengers next to you. We will continue our programme at 15:00….” droned the announcement on the paging system, followed by blissful, blissful silence. Out of more than 24 hours of train ride, only eleven hours were passed in silence: During our “night sleep” from 10pm to 7am, and during our “afternoon rest” from 1pm to 3pm. The remainder of the time, Big Sister on the speaker seems to feel it is her duty to keep us entertained; either by songs (mostly Chinese pop) or by various announcements. The favorite announcement seemed to be the one reminding us that it is against regulations to bring Dangerous Articles on to the train, followed by a very detailed list of what items are considered Dangerous Articles; as it appears, even lightbulbs can get very nasty in the proper conditions.

Long-distance trains are possibly the last bastion of “controlled life” in China (along with prisons and some government institutions). Your schedule is precisely dictated: ten o’clock is “lights off time”, and everybody goes to sleep. At seven o’clock the lights are turned back on and music starts pouring out from the overhead speakers, in case any “lazy birds” are having trouble getting up. Carts selling meal trays for breakfast, lunch and dinner pass in specific hours, and if you want to have a hot meal you should eat at that time (there usually also is a canteen carriage selling hot meals in restaurant-fashion, but often this canteen, too, only operates in “meal-hours”). Train attendants ceaselessly labour on maintaining various “regulations”: bags on the overhead department must not bulge over the side; curtains must be drawn in some times of the day, open wide in others; shoes placed under the bunks at night must be turned so that they are facing the corridor. All are “regulations” which have to be kept, and the personell are often ignorant of the logic which is supposed to lie behind them - when I asked a train attendent, as she was doing a night-round of the carriage and turning around all the pairs of shoes so that they face the corridor, why was she turning the shoes around, she count not give me a suitable answer. “Such are the regulations”, was all I could get out of her.

The Chinese passengers on the train can be roughly divided into two groups; Members of one group bring just a small amount of snacks on with them to the train and rely on the food sold on board the train. The members of the other group bring with them an amount of food suitable for feeding Anna Frank’s entire family for the whole duration of the war. If you’ve been reading all my posts carefully, you may remember me mentioning (in this post) that the Chinese like feeding their guests. Trains are no exception and people are likely to attempt to feed you - either from their own stocks or by actually buying you a meal tray from the passing cart.

People on the trains are an odd mixture of shy and nosy. In the beginning they will usually just sit silenty without talking to anybody. Once a conversation between two people begins, however, all the people within hearing distance will “butt in” and join the conversation. The scenario is very common: people are silent for the first few hours, getting more and more bored. At some point something snaps and one of them says something to the other, perhaps asking some question. A chain reaction ensues and after a few minutes there is already a heated six-person discussion on the best way to open a new business in Sichuan province.  If I am a part of the conversation, though, most of the content of the conversation (or at least its beginning) is known to me even before it started (you can read it here). Obviously I don’t like antisemitism, but I’ve never thought I’d develop such a hate towards prosemitism; it has reached the point that whenever I hear the phrase “Israelis are so smart” I have an urge to punch someone.

My cabin is a hard-sleeper cabin, the 2nd class out of four possible classes. There are bunks arranged in triplets one on top of each other, with a thin wall separating every group of six beds. Foldable chairs are also available on the corridor. It looks like this:

The “best” bunk is the bottom one (on which you can actually sit) and the “worst” is the top one. The ticket prices are set accordingly, with the bottom bunk ticket costing about 10% more than the top bunk. If you are of average height you cannot sit up on the top bunk without banging your head on the ceiling. If you do have the top bunk, be assured that this will occur many times during the ride. This problem is remedied on the “soft sleeper” (first class) cabins, in which the beds are arranged in spacious groups of twos instead of groups of threes, but that’s the main difference between them - other than the large price gap, of course. In addition to these there are also the “soft/hard seat” classes for the pour souls who will be sitting upright for the next 25 hours of train ride.

Big-city Chinese living the “fast life” often avoid taking these trains and prefer internal flights, as the extra day of travel is a wasted day of vacation. For people on a long journey through China, though, trains are a good way of relaxing and meeting new people - people who, like you, have absolutely nothing to do except sit in the cabin and chat with you.