This past weekend of the future, I took a train to the east coast to Qinhuangdao. The train left Beijing at 7 a.m. and it was the first time I'd seen 5:30 a.m. in Beijing without me staying out all night. The morning is quite peaceful if you don't have a head full of booze.
At 9 a.m. the express train pulled into Qinhuangdao. It's a small Chinese city of 2.8 million and there is nothing to do there. Nope. Nothing.
Except going to see The Great Wall and the Yellow Sea.
This woman loves the wall.
After we took a taxi back to the city, we tried to find something to do and ended up deciding to get our return tickets to Beijing. Before we left we were told we could get them after the game, but we decided to get them now, cuz we were all out of ideas for Qinhuangdao. We traveled to the station and decided to get some street beers. Then we met our Qinhuangdao running crew.
This is the guy who holds down the “chilling” part. That’s all he does and he plays cards. They’re a pretty subversive crew. One of them has the bus schedule on his phone and knows everything about the trains leaving. He just sits in the lot all day, which leads me to believe he’s part of the bootleg bus system that cruises Olympic folk back to Beijing. And one of them was a pimp. Two of his gals came to give him money when were hanging out and he threw them a few kuai. Just to clarify, our running crew doesn’t speak English and our Mandarin is shit. But we did communicate enough to find out that there was no bus and no train going back to Beijing.
So we ate a freshly beaten fish and went to the soccer match.
The game was great. Ivory Coast versus Nigeria. Nigeria scored two really nice goals and I cheered for Ivory Coast, who played like shit. The stadium was packed with about 95% Chinese people and a few Nigerians and some assorted whiteys.
After the match we met this guy. A Mongolian gentleman named Hans.
He has lived in Germany for the past 10 years and was more than willing to help us out after discovering our plans to sleep in the park for the evening. He told us he’d take us to a place that was 24 hours and we could have some drinks and wait until the bus came at 6 a.m. As it turned out the place was a German restaurant and the food was worse than horrible.
I ate a piece of a heart, some neck and something that didn’t sit too well. The beer was also shit. I guess, that's what we get for being dumb enough to eat German food. Especially in Eastern China.
The part of the night came when we decided we were going to sleep in the park. It was a nice park and I slept on my backpack. I don't think I've ever voluntarily slept on the concrete, but it was pretty cozy. I woke up at 5 a.m. to some old men doing Thai Chi next to me. I'm pretty sure I frightened them way more than they frightened me.
In the future, if your English buddy tells you that it will be no problem to catch a bus from Qinhuangdao back to be Beijing. He has no idea what he's talking about and you'll have to sleep in a park.
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