西安： PiB Intersession Break in Xi'an， Part 1 (of many)

At 11 am this past Thursday (7/14), PiB's official intersession break officially started.

Destination: Xi'an!

So here's the first part of how it all went down.

7/14/11, Thursday afternoon:
At about 3 pm, three other PiB'ers (all 4th year students) and I (a 3rd year student) get on a taxi to get to the train station. Not only does the train station look busy on the outside, but it's packed at every waiting area. We wait in the half-formed line to board the train. People are sprawled about everywhere, and there's even a party of several people sitting on newspapers and eating sunflower seeds to their heart's content.

[waiting for the train]

[boarding the train to Xi'an!]

When we finally get on the train, the crowd issue actually seems to get slightly worse. Although we weren't able to grab sleeper seats for the ride, we were still lucky enough to get actual seats. For the duration of the ride, there were actually people in aisles, subjected to a combination of standing and sitting on tiny foldable stools.

Also, did I mention that the train ride to Xi'an is 14 hours?

Nonetheless, I think the train was definitely quite an experience. For one, I was a bit worried since the tickets we got were for the so-called hard seats, but fortunately they were actually covered and padded, and about as comfortable as sitting on an airplane with cafe-style seating.

Although I think we were pretty content keeping to ourselves at the beginning, towards the middle of the night we broke out the card game of Set and a couple of people on board joined in. One of the 4th year PiB student gave a really fantastic explanation of the game, and later on, I was able to participate in the conversation instead of acting just as a spectator. In addition to discussing topics not directly tied to politics or economics (which often seems to be the case at PiB), it was also nice (and admittedly challenging) to speak with people with an accent not from Beijing.

To say that the train ride was long would be an understatement, but it was definitely worth it.

(to be continued in the next post)