The date was getting close to the expiry of my visa. I took a train to go further south East in China to get to a small city called Xiamen, just across the straits from Taiwan.
Part of the trip was on a slow train almost and it took 14 hours and the last 2 hours were on High Speed train. I think I took the wrong train because I had to transfer a couple of times. Sometimes it’s confusing because some cities have more than one train station, since they still have the old trains in the old stations and the high speed will sometimes operate from a different station. When I asked for direction and because of the language barrier I must have got the wrong instructions. Nevertheless the slow train trip was interesting. There were a lot of a no-smoking signs but they were ignored by a lot of passengers, this would have never been tolerated on a high speed train. There were a lot of people standing because they sell more tickets than the available seats. The train car capacity is 118 passengers but there were 140-150. I like how people can do business of anything in China 🙂 there was this vendor who was selling little plastic chairs for the standing passengers.
An interesting incident was when I heard some people shouting at each other while others were standing on their seats. . I saw some of the security officers on the trains approaching the people but they were just wanted to make sure that everything is alright. I took some pictures, and after talking to the passenger next to me, he explained that it was just a heated debate about religion, mind you they were all smiling and some were laughing.
I finally arrived in Fuzhou on the south East of China at 5:30AM. Plenty of people were waiting outside the train station for the ticket office to open so they can buy tickets to go to other destinations. I went to a hotel across the street to ask for direction, because I want to make sure that I go to the correct place where I will eventually take the boat to an island in Taiwan and then take a flight to Taipei. The hotel staff were so helpful, none of them spoke English but they went on a website similar to Google translate and we were able to communicate, and I got the correct information.
I took the train from Fuzhou to Xiamen, luckily this time it was a high speed train. I guess I started becoming picky, but once you try the high speed train you find it’s very clean and very comfortable, you don’t feel the train grinding on the rails, it feels more as if the train hovering.
