High feed train

I had a long train ride ahead of me. The high speed railway from Yichang to Shanghai is still under construction which will probably cut travel time down to 8 hours, but for now it is a much slower zig-zagging local train that takes about 24 hours. I went in search of provisions for the journey, several meals worth of instant noodles and snacks.

While there is nothing of note in Yichang, it is relatively quiet and orderly for a Chinese city. In my search for a supermarket, I actually stumbled upon a Walmart right smack in the middle of downtown. Quite a busy place, it was strange to set foot on a piece of America, Chinese style. In many of the department stores here, you first look at a sample of what you want, then get a salesperson to write up an invoice which you take to a cashier, pay for it and get a receipt which you bring back to the salesperson to claim your purchase. It was a simple consolation to skip that tedious process.

One of the interesting trends I noticed here is people walking around carrying double-walled glass flasks of tea. I've been looking around for one and Walmart had a good selection of them without a pushy salesperson hassling me. I've gotten to appreciate some excellent teas here, to the point that I have not missed having coffee on days I haven't had any. There is an amazing variety of tea, and some cost more per hundred grams than a bottle of expensive wine. One kind I like look like pellets when dry but unfurl to whole leaves after steeping in hot water.

The Yichang train station was amazingly quiet. They even put me through the VIP waiting room with cushy leather sofas as there was only a few of us boarding the single car of soft sleepers on the train.  I shared my sleeper cabin with three elderly Chinese travellers with whom I tried to communicate as best as possible. It is interesting how much of Chinese life revolves around food. The characters to convey the concept of population consist of 人口 , visually "person" and "mouth" suggesting the number of people you have to feed. The motherly woman in the cabin seemed concerned about my meagre provisions, and kept on giving me extras like a hardboiled egg or an orange to supplement my noodles. At any rate, it is hard to starve on the train, as there is a dining car and the attendants constantly rove around with carts with snacks or meals to sell.

The train chugged though the countryside past rice fields and vegetable farms, stopping at the major towns. Along one stretch, old buildings and homes along the track had red spray paint marks which seemed to indicate that they were about to be demolished. Elsewhere, huge numbers of concrete feet were being erected for the high-speed railway that will eventually march between Shanghai and Chongqing and beyond.