Last night at the Chongqing city bus and train terminal, I researched the possibility of each mode of transportation. Both options had sleeper berths. The bus leaves the next day at 1pm for ZhangJiaJie and would take 15 hours. This would mean I would have to look for housing for the night. The cheapest I found by the terminals were 110 yuan. The train option leaves the same evening but it stops south of ZhangJiaJie at HaiHua a little after 3pm. Then from there I would have to back track north up to ZhangJiaJie where WuLingYuan National Park was in Hunan. Both ticket prices were at 30 yuan difference. Since I didn't want to deal with sleeping in Chongqing City in a cheap poor condition place and also didn't want to fork out the money to stay at a nice hotel, I decided to sleep on the night sleeper train, two in one with price and time.
Last night I got onto the train and slept well. There was a man from GuangZhou in the next bin who decided to take action in his interest in learning about me by going through my stuff when I am not around. I saw him going over my note book that was the only item on my bed. When he saw me he through my book back as if it didn't happen. It was actually quite funny. I didn't confront him. I too have been watching him watch me. He works with IBM and understands English. Instead of striking a conversation with me he decided to just quietly over everything like a spy, except he didn’t have the slick touch of a spy so I knew he was not a professional spy. I finally had to strike a conversation with him myself to end the sneaking around by him. He wanted to read my journal. I told him it was already packed and I didn't want to pull it out. He got to see my notebook and didn't understand my coded English. It just appear coded with abbreviated shorthand, my style, my system and sometime I can’t even make out what I wrote in haste. He was used to formal documentation writing. He was a nice person who really didn't need to sneak and snoop around.
On the train things were great until a lady from Guangzhou and her 3 year old son from the next bin over decided to show up and hang out and wouldn't leave. She ended up talking in effort and started to loose her voice from all the shouting. I had to crawl up to my bed to make partition from all her activity. She was a nice person who needed to have an opinion about everything and the last word somehow. It's as if no one has ever given her the time and space to speak her mind, unfortunately it really wasn't her mind being shared. The opinions weren't even very well thought out and a bit disconnected. It just seemed like words taking up space. What's an opinion worth anyway? I actually got dizzy sitting next to her. But they were all very curious of me and really enjoyed my company. I had to put my ear plugs on to take a little rest and still her voice penetrated through my ear plugs. How amazing was that! The other people on the train will have to put up with her for another 14 hours because they don't get off till 5am the next day. The lady spent most of the time complaining about her son in front of him about how terrible he was. In fact he was quite well behaved and handled being in the train quite well. She threatened to send him away to scare him. This is also common among the Asians in parenting I've noticed. I've noticed her challenge in parenting has to do with her irregular or inconsistent practice that creates confusion or also the kid sees this and takes advantage of it sometimes.
On the train I saw a documentary on the question of MSG. They showed scientifically proven by scientist that MSG is from a protein compound that is found in every food. This compound in most prevalent in Chicken and seaweed. They proved that there is no chemical in MSG etc.... That MSG has not been proven to be bad for you. That the Americans who complained about MSG giving people a headache in Chinese restaurants, and making people thirsty etc... is not a common thing in China, the home of MSG use. I think this program was sponsored by MSG manufacturers. MSG makes my tongue numb. People really love putting MSG in everything. They put about a tablespoon of MSG in 16 oz dish. That is alot. It makes me feel weird and I can tell it is MSG because I naturally can't eat it, makes me feel sick. So I added no MSG to my list of no's when ordering food.
