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Because I teach English in China, my family
occasionally gets to travel around this remarkable country. Normally we
fly, but we decided to take the train this time, to get from Kunming to
Guilin and then Hong Kong. Part of our motivation was to avoid the hassle
now associated with air travel (“no you can’t bring water on board; please
take off your shoes and empty your pockets; sorry, only one suitcase and
you’ll have to trash that big tube of sun screen…”). But the best thing
about train travel is getting to see the real China: mile after mile of
endless fields, with farmers and water buffalo doing what they’ve done for
centuries. In addition, you can stretch your legs by strolling through the
cars, or by occasionally walking on the platform. With a berth, you also
get to sleep or nap when you feel like it. Furthermore, we met several
interesting people this time: a doctor who graduated from medical school
in 1959, a student who was dying to practice her English, and our
temporary roommate—an engineer who was intrigued by the game of Rummy we
were playing (he eventually joined us, and won his last hand as the train
pulled into his stop). Add beautiful mountains and rivers, and the time to
play cards with your family, and riding through China behind a locomotive
can be a really pleasant alternative.
But as the Chinese love to say, “Every coin has two
sides.” The beds are rather hard, my son doesn’t like the music and
announcements piped into your room, and you need to bring your own food
along (we saw very few people heading for the dining car). It also seemed
like every time we really needed to use the toilet, we found it
locked (since they don’t want to “water” the tracks in urban areas or
“while stabilizing”—Chinglish for “being stopped at a station”).
Furthermore, whoever sets the rules for the air
conditioner (AC) needs to check his motivation, for it certainly isn’t to
make passengers comfortable. The AC isn’t on when you board, so it is “hot
as blazes” in there; but by 3 a.m. you are breaking icicles off your nose.
I jumped off at one station to thaw out and take a photo, but gave up
because both the camera and my glasses were hopelessly fogged up.
Another big issue—at least to my family—is the
difficulty in finding cool refreshment. Like everywhere in China, trains
have handy hot water dispensers for your tea or instant noodles, but
getting a cold drink can be a challenge. My wife has said that one of the
hardest things to get used to in China is warm Coke. In summer’s
steamy temperatures, this southern girl wants ice dripping from the
bottle, and our teen-age son wants that first gulp to bring on “brain
freeze.”
One station’s pillars were festooned with large
Coca-cola advertisements, featuring the Olympic logo from last year’s
games and an irresistible ice-packed bottle of “the Real Thing,” but the
only refreshment available on the platform was in portable carts void of
electricity. Hoping I’d have better luck, I ventured into the dining car.
Things didn’t look good when the “stewardess tray” was loaded with tepid
bottles of tea, juice, and Pepsi products, but I asked anyway.
“Can I buy a cold Coke, please?”
A very pleasant restaurant-car worker replied (this
was in Chinese, of course) that he’d be glad to chill one for us, which
would be ready in an hour. Having seen the mobile tray, I inquired
specifically about the brand name of my soon-to-be-cool cola. “Oh yes,” he
said, “I know you foreigners like Coke, not Pepsi.”
An hour later I returned, and my wife finally got
her favorite, cold, beverage.
In the morning I returned to get the next bottle,
which I’d ordered the night before. (Yes, Vivian gets her wake-up caffeine
from Coke, not coffee.) Thanking the nice man, I said I’d be back at
lunchtime.
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“Oh,” he said, with disappointment in his voice.
“I’m sorry, we only had two Cokes. After all, there aren’t many foreigners
on this train. Would Pepsi be OK?”
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Our mid-trip destination was Guilin, where the news
reported a heat index of over 100 degrees. Pausing for refreshment amid
the awesome scenery, we sometimes found cold drinks, but even here
“lukewarm” was the rule of the day.
On the street, a can of Coke costs about 3.5 RMB
(24 cents). My “train man” charged a reasonable 4 RMB; restaurants often
charge 5 or 10, when it is available. When we entered the
“foreigners’ sightseeing boat” (to go down the awesome Li river) we found
people motivated to supply what their guests wanted; they unashamedly
charged 20 RMB for cold Cokes throughout the 4-hour ride.
I guess that “cold” encompasses a variety of
temperatures. Many restaurants say they have cold drinks, but what
arrives is sometimes barely cooler than the room (and far warmer than our
icy berth). At many convenience stores, they take them out of “Coke”
coolers, but touching the glass reveals that the machine isn’t even
plugged in. Sometimes cans are cool, while 1-liter bottles
are not. The point is that you learn to feel the merchandise before
you let anyone open it!
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Coke has been in China for decades (I drank it—warm—back
in 1985 while studying in southern China), but in spite of all the posters
showing Yao Ming and other popular stars drinking from cold bottles, it
seems that the advertisers are having a hard time getting through. At
lunch a few weeks ago, I ordered Cokes for my family, and offered to buy
one for my Chinese friend, too. He said, “No thank you; I’ve heard that
Coke makes you impotent.” Someone else told me that I shouldn’t let my son
drink so much of it because Coke stunts kids’ growth. I wonder how many of
these senseless rumors are floating around (probably motivated by another
drink company)!
In
closing, I have to give kudos to the nice man in the dining car. When I
returned at noon, there was a third, cold Coke waiting for me. The man was
off doing some errand, so I couldn’t ask where it came from, but my guess
is that he had jumped off at a station and found a warm bottle to chill
for me. If I owned a store, that’s the kind of man I’d want to hire. He
didn’t make a cent by giving me what I wanted, but somewhere he found the
motivation to go out of his way to take care of us. This dear man has
probably never even heard of Jesus, but this is the spirit of service He
sanctioned when He said, “The greatest among you, will be your servant.”
(Matt 23:11)
PS: The next time I took a long-distance train (2011), I
asked the people in the restaurant car if I could buy a cold Coke. They
answered, "Bu hui" ("No").
"Then can I buy a warm soft drink, and put it in your cooler for a
while?"
"Bu hui."
International visitors, looking for a cold drink on one of the Middle
Kingdom's hot days, may have to wait a long while for this aspect of
"modernization." |
