Hengshui - getting there

We missed the train we meant to catch to Hengshui, so we caught the next one (I cannot stress the convenience of transportation while we were in China enough, trains, buses and subways took us everywhere that we needed to go.) Hengshui is a city slightly southwest of Beijing, with a population of (only) 4 million.

We ate bad train station fast food for dinner, baozi, which are steamed buns with some sort of paste stuff inside that involved meat, possibly. The best ones have a thick, fluffy dough and a pleasant smear of meat or vegetable and flavorings on the inside. These were not the best ones, having a texture more akin to cardboard outside and hot grease on the inside.

We boarded and traveled in the dark on the full train, so I didn't have any opportunity to peek out the window at the non-city landscape we passed through. We did luck out with seats, though. Our tickets were for standing room only, but we managed to snag a whole bench seat. Three out of our four person party got to stand, with Bryan our Chinese friend (and the only one of us who spoke a lick of Mandarin) refusing to stand. This refusal was my first introduction to what I came to think of as the fierce Chinese insistence of courtesy.

We befriended the girl sitting across from us by butchering sentences from the phrase book and slowly repeating them after her, with tones only half mangled instead of completely destroyed. She introduced herself as "Lauren," her English name. She was a student, taking classes in hotel management and desiring to work at The Forbidden City for the summer. Our talk in English caught the attention of another gentleman who was standing in the aisle nearby and he came over and joined us. He was a student of law, and since we started discussing law and politics we had to consult the phrasebook's meager dictionary many times, and rely more heavily on the girl's excellent electronic dictionary to give us more specific language to use. We encountered a lot of reticence to the subject of politics. The girl didn't seem afraid, just completely uninterested, as though it was none of her business.

We got in to the city of Hengshui late, after dark and after dinner. As we disembarked with a clump of other passengers Brennan pulled his camera out, so that he could take a picture of the little old man who was poised with a camera right by the door. The little man clicked away with his camera, and Brennan clicked away with his as we continued to push our way through the turnstile. Turns out, the little old man was Bryan's grandfather (henceforth to be called Granddad, in this account) and he was very tickled by Brennan and his camera and stood making comments in Mandarin and prodding Brennan's camera with the curiosity of a passionate amateur. It was late enough that all of the family had already eaten, but they insisted on taking us out for dinner, anyway.

In the restaurant I got to experience my first real life authentic squat toilet, basically a basin set into the floor with the sort of black hole that gives little kids at potty training age the absolute terrors. The door to the bathroom would not lock or close all the way, and the stall door to the toilet had been taken down, so it was quite the rustic experience. Hey, in countries with squat toilets they have much stronger pelvic girdles from all that squatting, so there's always an upside.