Day 7 - It's OK to Sleep in a Chinese McDonalds

We had a flight back to Shanghai at about nine o'clock, but we actually had a good amount of free time before that. I slept in some. Every time I wake up Dave, always the early riser, was reading his Kindle, an electronic book thing that I was never jellos of before this trip. Every book I take adds a lot of weight to an already overcrowded backpack, but Dave has like 50 on that thing which he can take everywhere. The biggest downside though is that loosing a book is no big deal but loosing that thing would be expensive. We went to the bus station after we checked out of the hotel. The bus station had a 24 hour sign on it despite what we were told yesterday. We found out that you could only buy tickets right before the bus left and they were 40 a piece. There were a bunch of cab drivers and one offered to take us there for 200. Ken said the bus would only cost us 160 and the cabby immediately dropped his price to 160. I was a little suspicious of him since he dropped his price so quickly but I thought that if worst came to worst we would just get the bus. We was ready to leave immediately but our flight wasn't for a while and we wanted to get some lunch so we agreed to meet him in about three hours.

Some one had mentioned pizza before, and our last cab driver had said that there were in fact two pizza places fairly close to where we were, so we flagged down another cab. This cab driver was a woman, which is pretty unusual for China. China doesn't have any laws preventing women from doing anything or holding any job. Indeed one of the few things I admire that the Communists did was to promote gender equality, though they didn't exactly go out of their way to put women in high ranking positions. China is still in many ways a very conservative society, and that more than anything seems to curtail women's roles. I'm not sure exactly why but taxi drivers seem to be almost exclusively male so it was pretty unusual to have a female taxi driver, pity then that she was terrible. The Chinese word for pizza is "bisa" and when we asked her if she knew where we could get some she gave us an emphatic yes. The first warning sign was that she drove for quite a while before coming to anywhere. Our last taxi driver had implied that the pizza place should be fairly close. She went for a long time before coming to a hotel that might have had some sort of buffet. We tried to explain that that was not exactly what we were looking for and she just smiled and moved on.

The second worrying sign was that she seemed to say yes to any question. She seemed to speak OK English so Dave asked her if she knew where she was going, which got a yes, then he asked if it was close, which got a yes, and finally he asked if she would like to give him a million dollars, which got a yes. The third worrying sign was when she brought us to a KFC seemingly on the theory that this was American food and thus must be what we were looking for. I finally spotted what seemed like a pizza place, but I think it was closed. Ken called up Carrie, who apparently reads my blog enough to realist I've been misspelling her name, who asked the taxi driver if she actually knew where she was going. The final sign came when she told Carrie that she didn't actually know what "bisa" was. We pointed to the first restaurant we saw and just asked her to let us of there. We ended up going to some random Chinese burger shop. After lunch we went back to the bus station where are guy was patiently waiting for us. A lot of Chinese people have some sort of American apparel on, but our guy was covered head to toe in American brands, or at least good knock offs. His car was also a lot nicer than most of the ones usually used as taxis. While we were driving there he was juggling calls on three cell phones, at one point talking on two at the same time while driving.

About a third of the way there he suddenly stopped and another taxi drove up. It turned out the other taxi was heading the way we were going anyways. The new taxi driver handed the old on 100 RMB, more than half the fair, and took us in. I guess the first taxi driver could afford all the American stuff by taking 60% of the money for 30% of the work. We got to the airport pretty early so there was quite a bit of sitting around before we got on the plane. China usually has a sort of gritty industrialized dirtiness to everything but the airport was spotless. In fact I think it had the first western style toilet with toilet paper, the Chinese carry their own, I'd seen in any public place in China. The plane was about half full. Right in front of us was this cute little Chinese boy who spent most of the flight playing rock paper scissors with Dave. The father wanted us to know that he was a big shot so he showed us a $100 bill he kept in his wallet along with a 1,000 Russian Rubie bill. Considering our $600 a month salary is high by Chinese standards that's a lot of money he was carrying around.

The little kid was endlessly amused by Dave, and a few people in other rows were watching them as well. We got to Shanghai just in time for Lynn to meet her sister, who had just flow in from America and was nice enough to give us some delicious American snacks. We needed to get a train back to Changzhou so we got a bus to the train station. One guy sitting near us on the bus was studying Spanish at University, which Ken knows, so they had a long conversation in Spanish. It's really odd seeing a Chinese person speak Spanish. I know I'm here to teach them a foreign language, but they seem obsessed with English, seeing them speak something else is just odd. We arrived at the train station around midnight to find it alive with activity. There were tons of booths set up to handle all the people going home for Spring Festival. Actually it was still too early to go home but it was the popular time to buy tickets. The station was packed with migrant workers carrying huge sacks of God only knows what around. We waited for a while in the much shorter "today only tickets" line before being told that the next train to Changzhou wouldn't leave until 5:15 am. We tried to walk to a nearby Burger King but it was closed.

On the way people kept pestering us asking if we wanted a "hodil" which Dave eventually realized was a "hotel." This ended with him giving a five minute pronunciation lesson on the street corner. When we walked by them later they were just standing there practicing saying the word "hotel" to one another. I think it would be a great job in China to be an itinerant English teacher, wandering from place to place giving English lessons to those in need. We eventually came on a 24 hour McDonalds and ordered some food. There were a ton of people in there talking and sleeping, all seemingly waiting for some train to come in. One of the guys in charge yelled at some people for something, but he clearly had no problem with people sleeping. McDonalds in the US want people to get in and out as fast as possible but in China I guess as long as you buy something you've got a place to wait. So we waited there all through the night.