Long Vacation: Day 1

I’ve decided the best way to go about blogging about this colossal vacation is to choose 5 pictures a day and just mention other details. It will be hard to show so little but it’s the only way to keep me sane and get it blogged before I go home when I will have no motivation to do it at all (at least in theory, I could surprise myself). And due to circumstances out of my control I have to learn a new teaching method and teach first grade using it for the next 2 weeks and it might just be the death of me. That’s just me complaining but it’ll be alright. It just means I have other responsibilities and 9 days of vacation are looming over my head (known across the ILP board as the infamous "Long Vacation", hope you don't mind me referring to it as such). I’m also gritting my teeth and using smaller photobucket pictures because it’s faster. Oh the things I have learned to put up with here, you have no idea. Anyway, blabbing, let’s get to it!

We had to teach that morning, so instead of worrying about teaching I kinda lost it and just started being over-enthusiastic about everything and wasted time letting them pose for pictures. I was on the brink of vacation, can you blame me?

I sure love these kids :) Sometimes they give me grief but they’re the best.

Then it was a mad hustle to catch the bus downtown to catch a bus to Guangzhou to the train station! (I ride a lot of buses here..sigh). I can’t even remember what the train station was like, other than a lot of running around like chickens with our heads cut off, hauling our luggage up long flights of stairs and just feeling perplexed and stressed about making the train.

Took a break for a photo in the station but do I look as frazzled here as I felt? I sure think so. Still though, it was my first time on a real passenger train so all stress aside, pictures must be taken!

We got into the train and da dad a da! Behold, the sleeper train! And what a glorious thing it was, 6 bunks in a cabin, this was tons cooler than the Hogwarts Express!

The climb is pretty perilous to the top bunk! We had fun exploring for the first three hours, but with a total of 21 hours on it we got pretty creative.

What did we do, you might ask? A momentary shot at entertainment that was one of the only ones documented:

Trying to perfect the one eye crossed, the other eye not thing. I was getting pretty close before the combination of a moving train and going cross-eyed started making me sick.
We had a Chinese woman on the bottom left bunk who we made friends with but once again the language barrier was a problem. We watched for the noodle cart, met a Chinese rock band, used train squatters (interesting..), watched funny Chinese reality shows and finally turned in for the night. The beds were pretty comfortable, but cool factor of sleeping on a train at all made it a lot better. Before it got dark we got some awesome country scenery shots like this. We knew that once we woke up it’d be tons different. Before Beijing we’d never traveled more than a couple of provinces away. Traveling almost the whole height of China now, we hoped it was ready for us!