Trains in China

Trains in China: there are compartments of four beds, two up, two down. If you don’t know what you’re doing (like us) you end up buying tickets for the upper berths, as the lower beds sell out first and fast, even though they are slightly more expensive. We got on the train with our tickets, thinking we had ‘i-ge-baushang’ – one compartment to ourselves, and instead we still had the upper berths in two rooms. We tried to trade with the people we were sharing with, but they had paid more for their prized lower beds, and refused. However, when the men sharing the room with Joplin and my dad discovered that my father is 81 years old, one of them insisted on giving up his lower bunk out of respect for his age. It was the start of a wonderful conversation, both in that room, and McKinley’s and my room, which we shared with a couple and their 5 year old boy. She was a children’s book editor (!) and he worked with teacher training in the government. When we arrived in Beijing, they made sure we knew where we were going, wrote a note to our taxi driver, and even called the guest house to make sure we’d arrived safely.