Now what can I talk about? Hmmm... Finally, finally I'm reading "Crazy Love," by Francis Chan. I remember watching or listening to some of his sermons in China, where my teammates first introduced me to him. An amazing book! Again, if my brain cells weren't so fried, I could maybe share something insightful from the book. Maybe next blog post!
I've decided that one of the best sounds on earth is listening to the train that plows through the middle of the night very near to our apartment. There is always something comforting and constant about the rhythmic sounds of it steadily progressing down the tracks. Some of my favorite/most interesting moments in life have been on a train:
-In college my sister Andrea and I took Amtrak all the way from Topeka, KS to Rochester, NY--an impressive 28 hour journey sitting up the whole time. The trip commenced at about 3:30 a.m. in the little shack of a train station in Topeka. We boarded the train, which had come from who-knows-where. The entire train was sleeping, but the conductor began singing, "Chicago! Chicagoooo!" when he asked us where our transfer was. Then the train journeyed slowly through Kansas City, the most remote parts of Missouri and Iowa, and into Chicago. The train stopped at tiny little outposts on the prairie to mostly pick up Amish people and retired folks. It was extremely adventuresome. After switching trains in Chicago, we headed northeast through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. We had a great time seeing "Americana" close up.
-That same summer I took my first Chinese train, which was in every way different from an American train--much more chaotic and fun. It was a grueling journey on an ancient train from Beijing to Ningxia province, which lasted an entire 24 hours. It was my first experience with hard sleeper cars, each filled with at least 60 talkative, friendly, smoking, interesting people. I remember waking up on the third or top bunk, with a little boy hovering right in my face as he perched precariously on the rack intended for luggage. He was giggling, "Meiguoren, Meiguoren," (American).
-On that same trip, I also rode on a slow train through Ningxia province on the hard seats. I remember walking through cars and cars filled with peasants and farmers, most of them Muslim Hui people, trying to find a seat. At that time Ningxia was the poorest place in China, and might still be. They all lived on less than a 50 cents a day probably, and had never ever seen a foreigner. I remember finally wedging myself onto a seat, with the windows wide open in the middle of the desert! It was mesmerizing, to be surrounded by the poorest of the poor in the expansive desert and dried up creek beds, where the only signs of color was in the fields of sunflowers or thick, black smoke from powerplants.
-Later when I returned to China for 2 years, I had numerous other opportunities to take the train. It was always an adventure--the rush to get to the train with thousands of other people, praying not to get trampled, having little conversations in my very poor, broken Chinese, eating snacks with random strangers, having policemen check up on us, holding tiny babies, singing songs, reading books, looking at the endless landscape of people hunched over rice paddies and plowing fields with water buffalo, watching little children running alongside the train...
I guess trains for me represent adventure and new sights. Whenever I hear the lonely whistle of an Indiana Railroad freight train at night, I think about hopping on it, just to enjoy the journey and the view.
Here's a short collection of some of my train journey pictures throughout the years. Pictures can describe everything much better than words!
1 comment:
Oh, and how old were you when you rode on your first Chinese train? ;)
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