"Is it ten yet?"

During our vacation Susi and I travelled frequently by train because it was incredibly cheap. The downside of this is that it was also incredibly slow. We endured several train rides that lasted over 10 hours and 3 that lasted over 24 hours. During these train rides we passed the time sleeping, eating, studying Chinese, or just talking. The only point at which one of these train rides became entirely too long was on the train ride from Xi’an to Kunming. This was a mind numbing 36 hour train ride. We boarded the train at 9:00 P.M. on Monday and we arrived at 9 A.M. on Wednesday. Essentially this means that we spent two nights and an entire day in a small sleeping cabin with four random strangers. We filled a lot of this time snacking. However, we neglected to bring any real meals for this train ride and we soon discovered that 36 hours in which you eat only snacks is not exactly ideal. We also filled some of the time with studying Chinese. However, this got awkward very quickly because unlike us, everyone else on the train spoke Chinese, and could understand the simple phrases that we were mutilating in practice. By six o’clock at night on Tuesday we had exhausted all of our regular train activities, and we decided that 10 o’clock was the earliest time that we could go to sleep. This resulted in about four hours of Susi and I starring at each other, rarely saying anything other than “What can we do?” or “Is it ten yet?”

When we arrived in Kunming on Wednesday morning we felt a strange mixture of being exhausted from 36 hours in an uncomfortable train, and being filled with energy from doing essentially nothing for 36 hours. A few days later in Kunming we met a couple that was about to leave for a 90+ hour train ride to Lhasa, and I can only hope that they managed to escape somewhat sane.