Roadblock

Niall's here! We went to the train station this afternoon to buy tickets to Xi'an, where Niall, Brian and I had planned to meet up with three other teachers during our break next week. The problem we ran into is everyone in China travels during that week. Saturday - no tickets available. Sunday - no tickets available. Monday - no tickets available. The best we could have done was standing room only for 12 hours overnight on Friday. So then we tried different destinations: Qingdao, Nanjing, Shanghai, Harbin. Not only were there no tickets to Xi'an, there were no tickets anywhere. Everyone around us was getting the same answer: "Mei you, mei you." Finally I looked at the agent and asked (in the best Chinese I could muster), "Women keyi qu nar?" (Where can we go?). She left the counter and, after consulting with others, came back and wrote down the characters for Nanchang, a small city that's probably about 24 hours away. So we left without tickets. We put off making travel arrangements despite being warned this would happen. Anyway, lesson learned. We'll look into other options tomorrow, possibly the bus; otherwise, we'll plan some day trips or an overnight trip closer to Beijing.

China Fun Fact: On certain days up to 25 percent of the pollution over Los Angeles comes from China.