Zhanga: June 10, 2007

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Sunday, June 10, 2007 (5 comments)

I'm visiting my hometown (Wuhan) over the weekend, so I took a train. Apparently it's a pretty high-volume route, so there were four waiting halls, each of which were about four times the size of your usual airport gate waiting area. I don't know how they get that many passengers onto a train... I guess China is just amazing.

Speaking of crowded places, I take the bus and subway to and from work every day, during rush hour, so I really know what "crowded" means now. It means standing in a sea of people, not worrying about the driver hitting the gas or brake suddenly, because it's physically impossible for you to fall anywhere. It also means I've grinded my crotch against the asses of a million old men, and vice versa. I haven't yet figured out how this works yet, but somehow all the hot girls manage to elude me.

Speaking of grinding old man ass, one day I was just walking my usual route when these two 50-year-old guys on motorcycles came up to me and asked if I need a ride. No thanks man, I don't really feel like spreading my legs around your butt, grabbing onto your beer belly, and sitting there for 45 minutes as you blow cigarette smoke in my face while suddenly accelerating and braking and causing excessive intimacy.

Ok, no more old men. Hot girls. Ok so I was walking to the bus stop to transfer to the subway to get to the train station (you'd think it's easier to drive... until you've actually been to China), and two cute girls came up to me. They were way above average here, but they looked 16 or 17, and since I'm not interested in underaged girls I just ignored them and kept walking.

...anyways... I forgot what exactly they said when they approached me, but the idea was (in a flirtatious way), "Hey, we're kind of hungry... will you buy us a little something to eat?" Are Chinese people really this cheap?? And by the way, I hate girls who use their looks like that. I wish I had a semiautomatic ugly stick to use on girls like them.

Digression. A similar thing happened two years ago in Hangzhou. A 25ish couple came up to me and asked for a little money to buy a baozi or something. I was young and naive, so I didn't immediately turn away as I should have. They saw my weakness and took advantage of it. Eventually I ended up giving them a little money, probably around $0.50, to get them to go away. They didn't even look poor. They were dressed kind of like me on my good days, except more Chinese. How much money can you get by doing that every day?

Back to the two girls two days ago. So this by time I had already learned my lesson, and kept my baozi money to myself. I just said I need to catch a train and walked off. Unfortunately I had been on the toilet just before this incident, so I was pretty empty. I feel like it would have been funny in a sadistic way to flirt back and say, ok take my wallet out of my back pocket, and BAM nail them in the face with a nice smelly (juicy?) one.

One can dream.

When I started writing this, I was trying to write about the lady who sat across from me in the waiting area at the train station. Guess I got pretty sidetracked. Anyways, the first thing I noticed about her was her bag of sunflower seeds. Same brand that I always eat, but of course that's nothing new because every real Chinese person loves MSG seeds.

The thing that really kicked me, though, was the sight of a hollowed-out 4/5 watermelon (not half-watermelon!) filled with sunflower seed shells. I even managed to get a crappy picture of it with my phone's camera (I'm a creep-master) but it only contains like 5 useful pixels or I'd have posted it. This really had me awed for a while. I couldn't believe it -- it reminded me of my own habits, except a million times more awesome:

1. The watermelon is not half a watermelon, as I always eat it, but is more like 4/5 of one. This requires 1337ness to scoop out of.
2. She's using watermelon to freaking hold MSG sunflower seed shells!!!
3. The plastic spoon partially buried by the pile of shells was probably stolen from McDonald's in good Asian fashion.

Later, I found out that the spoon wasn't actually stolen from McDonald's, thus diminishing her ownageness by maybe 1%. I went to buy a bottle of water before boarding, and found that they had little watermelons for sale. They come with a plastic spoon and knife in a little plastic-wrapped package with a hard bottom container, kind of like the containers that Kroger and Publix sell meat in. By the way, that melon had the skin of an apple -- the plastic knife cut it easily.

(Yes, I brought a bag of sunflower seeds.)

I decided to ride 软卧 (the nicer beds) this trip, motivated almost entirely by the nicer bathrooms. Yes, cheap me is willing to pay double the price for the privilege of having toilets that aren't filled and piling up with steaming piles of shit (this has happened often when I rode 硬卧). So in each of these little room thingies, there are four beds (two bunks). I was the first one there, so I sat on the bed and started playing around with stuff. Can you believe there are TVs for each passenger? And not only that, but they're LCDs. Trains never used to be this nice!

Ten minutes after I arrived, a woman came here. She looked at the sign on the door, looked at me, looked at her bed across from mine. This repeated about five times. Eventually she sat down and she asked where I was going, and we agreed that we were indeed going in the same direction. Then it made sense. She told me she thought the rooms were assigned by sex, so I guess when she saw me here she was really confused.

Every time I encounter a stupid Chinese person, I get this massive ego boost. Like, "I, a foreigner who can barely speak Chinese, know something about this country that you, a real Chinese person, don't know!" Yeah um, when you buy your train ticket, they don't ask you for your name, sex... or any information. You just tell them where you're going and what class, and they tell you how much money. Not sure how they would separate anybody based on anything...

Speaking of huge ego boost, a few people have asked me for directions in Shanghai, and I was able to answer two of them! I am amazing. Well, then again, I don't really know if I actually pointed them in the right direction.

1:00PM

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