Hardware, train tickets, and how much can you fit on your scooter?

One of the first things that we knew we needed to do was to buy train tickets to X'ian. Tickets are often sold out a few days ahead of departure, and with the World Expo happening in Shanghai, we figured the number of people traveling to and from Shanghai might make it difficult for us to leave.
    According to our Lonely Planet guide book, we had two different options: there was the train station, was far enough away that we would either need to take a taxi or subway to get to, or there was a train ticket office that was somewhat in our neighborhood, and that would give us a chance to explore a bit of the city on foot.

    Our journey took us to a hardware district that was about an hour's walk away from our hostel (a bit further than it looked on the map). Each storefront in this area was packed from floor to ceiling with various wrenches, drills, piping, electrical wire, couplings, screws, nails, floorboard, window panes, door panels, siding, power tools, steel chains -- or whatever a resourceful Chinese man might need to jerry-rig a scooter to carry 10 times its own weight. If we walked by a plumbing store, we would walk by 3 more that were identical before we saw an electrical store. Most of the shopkeepers either talked animatedly into a cordless phone or played solitaire on the computer while the wife and kids sat on the floor, playing with some of the inventory.

    Walking through the city, it was interesting to see how the city organized it's space. Most areas were divided into large city blocks, where on the main city streets surrounding these blocks were small shops, and on the inside and upper levels of the block, were residences. Going into these large blocks, there were small alleyways that were often just wide enough for a small vehicle to travel down. Sometimes steel gates, or even guards blocked the entrances to these alleyways. It was clear -- even when there weren't steel gates, that these were private areas where we probably weren't welcome to take uninvited strolls. People would often be lounging outside of their front doors, or hanging laundry, or bathing their families with soap and water from a garden hose.

We learned very quickly that the Lonely Planet can only get you so far in China, as we ended up chasing places that appeared to have moved a block or two down the street, or across the street, or that simply didn't exist. In the case of the ticket office that we were trying to find, we eventually found it between two streets that supposedly did not exist, and it had closed an hour before the listed times in the book. This turned into even more of a disappointment when we ended up having to take a taxi to the train station, which turned out to be something of a madhouse.

Aside from being a massive structure with lineups pouring out of its very orifice, and having people strewn about the pavement outside with their luggage, sleeping on newspapers, there was virtually no English to be found. Taxis whipped in and out of the drop-off zone, where we took our first steps towards the station, and our first task was to figure out which line we needed and then how to ask for the tickets that we wanted. We ended up finding a series of small signs that led us across the street from the station. We looked into the building across the way, where we saw more lineups of people, but this time, in front of ticket windows there were large screens full of scrolling Chinese characters above them. We weren't sure if we were in the right place yet, but a girl in a red dress probably saw the looks on our faces and asked us in English if we needed help. She said that we were in the right place, but that the people here probably wouldn't speak any English and that there wouldn't be many tickets available. She suggested that we go online and buy plane tickets instead.
    Feeling quite unsure, so we waited in line anyway, while searching out the Chinese characters for the place that we wanted to go. The lady at the window seemed to understand us, and she even understood words like, "seat," and "sleeper," but they were repeated back to us as "no seat," and "no sleeper" for the day that we wanted to leave. "Only standing" was her suggestion. It was a 16 hour train, so we asked about the next day. Looking back, I think we were lucky to find our "hard seats" on the 20 hour train ride that left the day after we wanted.
    It was getting dark by the time we left the station, so we took a subway to the People's Square, which looked interesting on our map and wasn't too far from where we were staying. The subway was crowded, but efficient overall -- except for the security check that had metal detectors and that ran everyone's bags through an x-ray machine.
    We found a series of restaurants on our way home and had dinner at a place where everyone seemed too nice and eager to help us. Although we were used to people paying more attention to us in Japan because we were foreigners, in China, this attention often took the form of shameful excess. If we didn't have 3 or 4 servers around us, wide-eyed and grinning, they would be sure to gawk at us from across the room -- only to smile and nod profusely whenever we made eye-contact. But i guess it's to be appreciated.
    I seem to remember the food being good, but i usually end up ordering food that's too spicy for Janice and i think that this evening was no exception.
    On the way home, we stopped at the 24 hour convenience store beside our hostel to buy our tickets for the Expo the next day, but it had already closed its doors. (What? Open 24 hours and they were closed? Yeah).