May Day is almost here. In the PRC that means a week long holiday! Incidentally, none of our students know about the Haymarket riots, or the role of the American labor movement in instituting an 8-hour workday. Josh tried to convince one of his classes that their International Labor Day originated in the United States. They didn’t believe him.

We are celebrating May Day with a trip to Qingdao, the Switzerland of China. I am really excited, but I am not looking forward to the 16 hour train ride.

Buying train tickets is the hardest thing we have done in China. The first time we tried to do it we were travelling from Beijing to Jinzhou. We witnessed a pretty bad fist fight break out between three people who were in line. Seriously, they were going at each other’s eyes with keys! We managed to buy tickets, thanks to the concierge at our hotel, who wrote down our request in Chinese.

The second time it was even harder. The train station was packed to the gills with students who wanted to buy tickets home for the May Holiday. We waited in line for an hour. Then when we got to the front of the line, we were told (through a student who was nice enough to interpret for us) that it was only five o’clock, and the tickets we wanted were not available until six!

We went outside to get some air, and we went back in at five-thirty. We had to wait another hour-and-a-half to get to the front of the line again. We gave the ticket lady a note that described what we wanted. “Mai-yo!” she said, meaning they were sold out. We said we would take a different class of ticket. “Mai-yo!” she said again. There were no seats left on the whole train!

At this point the woman behind us started pushing a wad of bills in front of our faces. She didn’t want to wait for the stupid foreigners to finish, so she just pretended we weren’t there. I began to understand how the fist fight in Beijing had started. Lots of people in that situation would say to her, “Get that money out of my face, you fat, old, cow,” and then they would have to throw down. Luckily, I don’t have the language ability for that, so I ignored her.

We had been waiting for hours, so we were determined to get a ticket to Qingdao, one way or another. The students who were helping us told us there were no seats left. “You mean, there is no room on the entire train?!” asked Josh. They explained that we could get unreserved seats, and perhaps upgrade them once we got on the train. “Good. That is what we want,” said Josh.

That is how we bought unreserved seats on a 16-hour train ride. Our hope is that we will be able to buy seats, or maybe even sleepers, once we get moving. It is also possible that we will be sitting for sixteen hours on a floor covered with spit, vomit, the spent shells of sunflower seeds, cigarette butts and baby urine. We really don’t know what to expect.

More to come on the other side….