First, you can only buy one-way tickets. That means you have to buy your return ticket when you arrive at your destination or ask a friend (or a friend to ask their cousin's ex-boyfriend's former boss' daughter's former roommate's aunt...) at your destination to buy one for you. People are very accommodating when it comes to helping out an acquaintance's acquaintance get a train ticket.
Second, you can only buy a ticket 10 or fewer days before your departure.
Third, you can almost never go to the station and buy the ticket you want because they are sold out, seemingly before they go on sale. That means you have to use your web of connections (关系, guanxi in Chinese) to get a ticket.
I'm lucky. Tiger has a friend he can call (Sean). We don't know the details of Sean's connection to train tickets. Tiger just calls him, and he calls Tiger back with a phone number. Tiger calls the number and provides the details of what we want. The guy gives us a price and tells us where to meet him with the cash. Once, it was a woman. We meet the man or woman inside a subway station, exchange the cash for the tickets, and we are set. It sounds an awful lot like a high school drug deal, I know, but that's how it's done.
There are different compartments in the train. For overnight trains, soft or hard sleepers are the best. I've never been in a soft sleeper, but they're the most expensive. Hard sleepers have a set of triple bunks in each compartment. Bottom bunks are preferred because you can sit up in them. However, because people can't sit up in the middle or top bunks, people often sit on a stranger's bottom bunk. I've had all three beds at one time. For shorter night trains (8 hours), I'm okay with any bed. But for longer trips (10-15 hours), I want a bottom bunk. There are some seats in the car but only 2 per compartment, so they fill up fast.
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| I took this from the top bunk. |
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| Can you see my head way up there? |
Tiger and I just secured tickets to Qingdao, the city where the beer Tsingtao is made. We're going on Tuesday morning. The trip is only 5 hours, so we got seats. This will be my first time in a car with seats. We plan to take a boat from Qingdao to Dalian. Both cities are on the coast, and I'm looking forward to hitting the beach. I have to wait until the 8th to ask someone in Dalian to buy me a ticket back to Beijing =/ Tiger is between projects, so he will hang out in Dalian another week.
