Beijing Part one: Getting there

Ni Hao wo de pengyous he jia (Hello friends and family). So I've made it safely to Beijing, had a good time on train (didn't sleep much, but had fun). So we were supposed to leave campus for the train station at six sharp on Friday evening, we didn't end up leaving till about 6:30 and trying to get through rush hour traffic to get to the train station in time was a little terrifying, but we made it. So their are 33 students on this trip and three teachers so we had enough to have a whole car to ourselves, which was nice since we didn't have to worry about disturbing others with our rowdiness. It was dark for the whole time we were on the train so the only time we able to see outside of the train was in about the 15 minutes before we pulled into the station while we were all waking up.

My professor having done this trip a few times before was thinking ahead when he brought his guitar or as he called it "a karaoke machine" (karaoke is actually really big in China). So about 12 or so of us climbed into a cabin built for four and started belting out classics. Needless to say we had a pretty good time.

So we rolled into Beijing at seven am on Saturday, almost exactly twelve hours after we had boarded the train. While we did have soft sleepers, and were theoretically well rested, sleeping on a train is not exactly sleeping well, combined with having to be up a lot early than most of us are used to, we were all very tired. This was not ideal because as you'll see in the next segment of my 'Beijing series' we had a jam packed Saturday.

-AL