National holiday is a very big event here in China. I have heard it said that holidays in China account for the largest human migrations to date. Millions of people hoard the various forms of land transportation and the most popular form of travel is the train, or huache in Chinese (literally, fire vehicle). Naturally, for our first travel experience in China, we too opted to take the fire vehicle and we took that train north to a little place called, yichun. Getting on the train was an event in itself. I may never understand the Chinese rush. The rush is evident in the way they have restructured their society, it is evident in the way an entire city road will be torn apart and rebuilt within a week, and it is especially most evident when you are boarding any form of public transportation. It doesn’t matter if there are two people or ten, Chinese people have no use for organized lines and the concept of taking turns. As a bus approaches a bus stop you will see all the desired passengers of that particular bus hoard the door as it opens and at this moment everyone starts shoving and pushing their way to the door as if the bus would suddenly lurch back out into the road without them aboard. It is common for me to have hands or fists in my back pushing me forward into a mass of people that is impossible to penetrate. I have gotten used to being shoved up against strangers and I have even adopted some of the local customs for boarding buses. I usually stick out a very firm arm and resist anyone who tries to move passed it. I have noticed that this has earned some kind of bus boarding credibility, because I get respect for my aggression; People respect the arm. Now, take this previously described situation, multiply it by 200 and that’s what you have when boarding a train on national holiday – thousands of people rushing the doors of the train. We were boarding our train nearly 30 minutes before it’s departure and still people were crammed into every door of the train like sardines. I literally watched as five people unrelentingly forced themselves into a doorway and then all started yelling at each other because they were stuck. One lady in the middle of these five was furiously flailing her arms as if the other four were idiots for intentionally wedging her into that spot, but it also looked as if the other four people thought the same thing of all the others, so this is a battle that no one can win. In the limitations of my Western head I think, why don’t they just have a system that train station employees enforce where people can only walk one way at certain parts of the train while boarding. Oh, I forgot to explain a large part of the problem. Many people board the train at different cars and then try to walk through the train to their car. This could mean a person boards on train car one and then opts to walk through the train to car ten. This creates a lot of the people jam. To be honest, I have created a whole series of systems that would make many of these simple, everyday tasks a no-brainer operation, but this is China and in a place that is rushing to the top so fast, there is no room for developing systems. Beside that, all one can really conclude is the statement that surpasses logic, ‘this is China.’ Even once we got to our seats after fighting a crowd of people, the five of us sat smashed up against other people because in Chinese trains you have a series of classes that include sleeper, soft seat, hard seat and standing. The standing people are in the hard seat section and from my limited experience, they oversell the standing class by a long shot and this results in a completely full aisle that bleeds into the seats. If there is a row with two seats that could actually mean two standers have figured out how to make it a four-seater.
Yichun is situated about an hour from the Russian border and is the family home of our Harbin friend, Miracle. The train ride to Yichun was like breathing fresh air again…literally. The train came out of the city and we watched the sunset without a single building or random metallic structure obscuring our view. As the sun fell behind the rolling hills of Northern Heilongjiang I thought about road trips with my family staring out the window of our suburban as we approached the foothills of the Rockies. It was a Wild West type of sun; only, this was a Wild East type of sun. With the urbanization of the East and increasing migrations from the village to the city, this kind of setting is a nostalgic scene of the past for many Chinese.
We arrived in Yichun to find that the temperature had dropped by about 20 degrees. We went from the upper 50s to freezing. Spending my last four years (mostly) residing in Southern California has really eliminated my tolerance for the cold and this little trip helped me realize it. If we weren’t walking around town to stay warm, we were shivering from the unruly winds that raced through the buildings. Eventually, it started to rain and this rain lasted for about 16 hours, which would make up the rest of our vacation in Yichun. It wasn’t a bad thing. We were staying with Miracle’s aunt and uncle who live in a very traditional style house and it was very insightful to see the way that many rural Chinese live today.
After Yichun, Jared and I made our way to China’s capital, Beijing. Many people have asked us what we thought of Beijing after living in Harbin and this is what I can say, it is a big city and like all cities everywhere, it has everything you can think of. From McDonalds to China’s largest malls, Beijing has everything except for a simple place to find some good Chinese food. I realize many Beijingers would read this and be offended because I admit, we were restricted to the subway route which I’m sure caters to tourists. The highlights of the trip included seeing my best friends, Andy and Trudy and climbing the great wall with them. We told the driver taking us to the wall that we did not want to go the tourist route. He dropped us off at a spot where there were legitimately no tourists and no fee to get on to the great wall. The cons included no real path to the wall and about 3,000 feet of mountain to climb in order to even get to the wall. 6 hours later three shirtless sweaty men and a blistered-foot girl reached an unrestored part of the great wall. Let me just say, we hear a lot of stories about the great wall, but when you climb a mountain to get to it and stand on it’s historical stones on a perfectly clear day…it is amazing! How people any time in history built something like that is just crazy. It may not have kept the Mongols out, but hundreds of years later, it keeps the tourists in.
~Johnny Young
Yichun is situated about an hour from the Russian border and is the family home of our Harbin friend, Miracle. The train ride to Yichun was like breathing fresh air again…literally. The train came out of the city and we watched the sunset without a single building or random metallic structure obscuring our view. As the sun fell behind the rolling hills of Northern Heilongjiang I thought about road trips with my family staring out the window of our suburban as we approached the foothills of the Rockies. It was a Wild West type of sun; only, this was a Wild East type of sun. With the urbanization of the East and increasing migrations from the village to the city, this kind of setting is a nostalgic scene of the past for many Chinese.
We arrived in Yichun to find that the temperature had dropped by about 20 degrees. We went from the upper 50s to freezing. Spending my last four years (mostly) residing in Southern California has really eliminated my tolerance for the cold and this little trip helped me realize it. If we weren’t walking around town to stay warm, we were shivering from the unruly winds that raced through the buildings. Eventually, it started to rain and this rain lasted for about 16 hours, which would make up the rest of our vacation in Yichun. It wasn’t a bad thing. We were staying with Miracle’s aunt and uncle who live in a very traditional style house and it was very insightful to see the way that many rural Chinese live today.
After Yichun, Jared and I made our way to China’s capital, Beijing. Many people have asked us what we thought of Beijing after living in Harbin and this is what I can say, it is a big city and like all cities everywhere, it has everything you can think of. From McDonalds to China’s largest malls, Beijing has everything except for a simple place to find some good Chinese food. I realize many Beijingers would read this and be offended because I admit, we were restricted to the subway route which I’m sure caters to tourists. The highlights of the trip included seeing my best friends, Andy and Trudy and climbing the great wall with them. We told the driver taking us to the wall that we did not want to go the tourist route. He dropped us off at a spot where there were legitimately no tourists and no fee to get on to the great wall. The cons included no real path to the wall and about 3,000 feet of mountain to climb in order to even get to the wall. 6 hours later three shirtless sweaty men and a blistered-foot girl reached an unrestored part of the great wall. Let me just say, we hear a lot of stories about the great wall, but when you climb a mountain to get to it and stand on it’s historical stones on a perfectly clear day…it is amazing! How people any time in history built something like that is just crazy. It may not have kept the Mongols out, but hundreds of years later, it keeps the tourists in.
~Johnny Young