Sunday morning I took a train from Shanghai to Beijing.  The ride was about 10 hours and I had no seat reserved because all the seats were sold.  So that meant I was going to have to stand or sit on the floor for the entire 10 hour ride.  I was not looking forward to the trip, but it had to be done if I wanted to get to Beijing.  The first 2 hours were okay.  I sat on the floor between train cars and I actually had plenty of room to spread out.  I was thinking to myself this is not so bad.  I don't know why other people I had talked to complained about not getting seats.  Then we make our first stop.  No one gets off and a ton of people get on and apparently none of them had seats either.  So now my luxurious sitting area just became packed and it stayed that way for the next 8 hours.  In fact I could no longer sit and had to stand for the entire 8 hours.  If you want to know what that is like then do the following:  stand with your feet about shoulders width apart, draw a circle tightly around the outside of your feet, now don't move out of your circle for 8 hours.  So you can only imagine how sore my feet were when it was all done with.  Let's just say I didn't do anything today because I wanted to stay off my feet as much as possible.  I just ate breakfast at the hotel and went to the store to buy some groceries.  My room is very nice as you can see and it was cheap.  It is nice to have my own room with my own bathroom.



Anyways, here is the best story from the train ride.  We are about 3 hours into the ride and I am standing with my bags on the floor behind me.  Across from me is a hot water machine (for soups, noodles, teas, etc) and a makeshift trashcan.  So some idiot doesn't drink the broth from his soup and pours it into the trashcan.  Well needless the say the broth starts coming out the bottom of the trashcan and it is rolling around on the floor.  So everytime the train tilts towards me the broth starts coming towards me.  I start to get worried about my bags getting wet so I am just watching the broth hoping the stewardess will come by and clean it before it becomes a problem.  Well the train hits a turn and here comes the broth at full speed.  So I panic and grab my bags.  Luckily some locals notice and throw down some newspaper and help out.  Then the stewardess comes by and cleans up the mess.  So I am just thinking to myself "great now I have to pay attention to the trashcan for the entire trip to protect my bags."  Then about 30 minutes later a lady comes running to the trashcan.  At first I can't tell what she is doing until she turns I notice she is holding a toddler who is trying to pee into the trashcan.  Surprise, Surprise.  The baby missed the trashcan and now we have pee rolling around the floor like the broth was earlier.  So now I am thinking I have to find a place to move my bags because I am not getting pee on them.  Luckily as I was looking around I noticed a spot behind some seats so I stashed my bags out of the way, but I still had to stand in the splash zone the rest of the way to Beijing.  In the end I made it to Beijing alive, dry and very tired.