April 24: On the train back to Beijing. Instead of Singaporeans, this time we are acquainted with a young Swedish couple who advises us on travel in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Thailand. I spend much of the day reading the China guidebook and writing in my journal, neglected during my stay in Guangzhou. One of the highlights of the day is discovering this quote on a can of Chinese soda: “It contains many nutriments and regulates the physiological function. The postponement of senility. The promotion of health and has revitalizing effects.” No ingredient listing.

April 25:  Back to Beijing.  Glenn and I feel smug, like we own the place. The train arrives at 6 a.m., so we put our stuff in lockers and take a long, leisurely stroll down to the Beijing- Toronto Hotel, where we treat ourselves to yogurt & muesli at the coffee shop and a Herald Tribune at the kiosk. Then off to the bike rental and the Indian embassy, where we are told we can get a 6-week visa by Thursday afternoon.

We go by the U.S. embassy to check the travel advisories and are told of a Sino-German cooperative polyclinic where we can get any remaining immunizations we need. We wander in search of it until we’re about ready to blow the whole thing off when we snag an American chiropractor cycling by who leads us there. Gamma globulin? Hepatitis B vaccination? No problem. All for Y125. What a relief. And it doesn’t even hurt. Glenn was in pain for a few days after his gamma globulin in Moscow, but this nurse is clearly more skilled with a needle.

More erranding. We go to the train station and get tickets for Xi’an, to leave Thursday night. I notice we get 2 of the last 4 available tickets.  Whew. We once again get cheap accomodations at the Jing Tai, and collapse in our room for a while, as neither of us slept very well on the train last night.

In the evening we both make calls home. Everything is well on both sides of the ocean. I call Kathy to see if she’s coming to Xi’an. She is trying to get a train ticket, and in the meantime is recovering from a bicycling accident she had the night Glenn & I left Guangzhou. No broken bones, no concussion, but plenty of pain and two and a half hours in a Chinese hospital. She says she feels better than she thinks she ought to. I’m extra careful biking to dinner.

We enter the “Numbers Cafe’” for a last fling of Western cuisine before the road New Delhi. Enticing color pictures of a wide array of dishes hang on the wall.

Glenn chooses a sumptuous- looking stew and points to it. The cashier smiles and says “Mei you” – (“not have”). He chooses and points again. The girl at the cashier smiles again.  “Mei you.” Of 12 mouth-watering portraits on the wall, Glenn chooses all but four. None are available. Fortunately it’s a little bit more amusing than frustrating. “Well, what DO you have?” Glenn asks. “Hamburger, hot dog, cheeken leg.”

We order 2 hamburgers. The results of the ordering process are nearly as comical as the process itself. We receive silver dollar size, wafer-thin patties on enormous, terribly stale buns. Risking alienating all the Chinese patrons, not to mention staff, I capture the moment on film.

April 26: A day of erranding. Sometimes it seems that half of our trip is spent making preparations for the other half. This is one of those times. We make trips to the post office, the U.S. embassy, the Time bureau, and again to the Sino-Germanic clinic.We notice that regardless of which direction we bike, it’s always into the wind.

We decide to seek out the Moscow Restaurant for dinner; a little taste of “home.” I wait outside while Glenn asks for directions in the “Beijing Overseas Hotel,” when suddenly a Chinese woman walks up and starts speaking in Russian to me.

It’s strange to hear Russian with a Chinese accent. She asks me if I am from the Soviet Union and seems surprised when I tell her no, I’m American. She says there are a lot of young Russians in the hotel this week, which is why she assumed I was Russian. Beautiful irony. We chat for a while, and part with a “Do svidaniya.” The Moscow Restaurant is way over by the zoo, so we pick a Chinese eatery over by the railroad station instead.

I set as my mission for the evening finding someone who is going on the Trans-Siberian and giving them Maria’s phone number at the U.S. Commercial Office in Moscow to send greetings. In the lobby of the Yong Ding Men hotel, I approach the first European-looking person I see. He is Polish, speaks no English, but invites me in Russian to come give his English-speaking friend the phone number and message.

I meet his roommates and talk to the English-speaking girl, Marszewa. She promises to call and tell them that she met me in Beijing, that I’m on my way to Pakistan, and that I send my love. I hope she doesn’t forget.

As I am leaving to go back to the Jing Tai and shower, they invite me to come back in an hour or so when some more Poles are coming by. It’s not something one but there are actually a lot of Polish people who visit China. It’s apparently very easy for them to get a visa. At least half of the residents of the Jing Tai and Yong Ding Men hotels are Polish.

I return at 10pm. There are six or seven people sitting around. I speak English with some, Russian with others. They are very friendly, and many of them well-traveled. It’s not long before the components of a Slavic dinner begin to appear on the small table: sliced white bread, fatty sausage, cucumbers, a few tomatoes, and the ubiquitous bottle of vodka. It’s a very familiar scene; I think of the many nights spent this way with my Russian friends, and wonder when I’ll see them again.

More Poles come over, more vodka is brought out, greater decibel levels are attained. I speak for a while with Marszewa’s travel companion, Renata, who moves from English to Russian to Polish in the middle of a sentence. “Have you been to Poland?  Why not?  Why don’t you come this year?” They seem anxious that I should come and see how much nicer Poland is than the USSR.

Mick, a young Brit Glenn and I met briefly in the phone center, and Yves, his Austrian roommate, come by and join in. By now there are about 15 people in the room, and a round of traditional Polish folk songs has begun. They all sing with great enthusiasm until a man living 4 doors down comes to ask them to pipe down. They find it funny that they have managed to disturb someone 4 rooms away, and repeat the phrase “4 rooms” in Russian and English until they’re sure I understand. As the evening at last begins to wind down, I take a couple of addresses and promise to come to Poland soon. Lots of embracing and Slavic cheek-kissing, and I walk home, a bit less steadily than when I came.

April 27: While waiting for my call to Kathy to go through, I recruit yet another trans-Siberian traveler to phone Josh and Maria in Moscow. I am struck with the idea of setting in motion sort of a “chain letter” greeting to them. I tell people in Beijing to call when they’re in Moscow, and pass the message when they get to Berlin to someone just starting, heading for Beijing. Then, when they get to Beijing, having called in Moscow, of course, they find someone going back – and so on, until for three months Josh and Maria have been inundated by calls from travelers sending my greetings. What fun. I decide against it.

Beijing is abuzz today. There are rumors of a huge student march in the afternoon, and Tiananmen Square and the surrounding blocks are guarded by a line of soldiers allowing no one to pass. People wait expectantly as more soldiers are brought in, and I watch and wait from my perch on a fence, but there is no visible sign of the marchers from where I am until I leave to meet Glenn and go to the train station. We catch the train at 7:30, and once again fall asleep to Chinese pop music.

April 28: It seems that all of China is covered with rice paddies and small communities of the people who cultivate them. The land is lush green vegetation coming out of brownish-red dirt. People carry enormous loads in buckets at both ends of carrying-poles. The countryside is very geometric, very orderly. The only disorder is in the l5 yards on either side of the train where passengers have tossed their garbage out the windows. No one seems to have any sort of conscience problem with this. Even the trash buckets at the end of the car are emptied by being dumped out the window by train employees.

We are traveling through Shanxi province. It is fairly mountainous for eastern China, and many of the villagers’ dwellings are actually caves. There are caves for storage and caves where people live. Some are very simple, others have ornate doors and decoratively sculpted designs. Many of the small houses are made from  mud bricks rather than wood or stone. Wreath-like sculptures made from garbage collected by the tracks dot the landscape.

In the bunk next to us is a young Norwegian woman traveling alone. She watches us indulge in a styrofoam box-lunch of rice and greens and confides that she hasn’t eaten  anything but bread and peeled fruit in China, for fear of getting sick. She is wearing a button that says “Esperanto.” We never learn her name.

We arrive in cold, rainy Xi’an. Kathy is here, having flown from Guangzhou earlier in the day. Glenn and I reserve train tickets for Urumqi for only Y120 each, and the three of us set off in search of a cheap hotel. We walk a fair number of blocks in the cold drizzle, then catch a bus to just outside the city’s south wall.

At the “Victory” hotel, with big communist red stars on the gates, we are offered three beds in a 4-bed room for Y13 each. Eight months of dealing with the frustration of the Chinese system manifests itself suddenly as Kathy becomes enraged at the hotel management’s refusal to accept RMB in payment. Kathy is paid by her institute in RMB, which cannot be converted into FEC legally, and illegally she would receive about half of what she traded in RMB, so she is justifiably angry at the hotel’s refusal to accept her white teacher’s card, her official permit to pay in RMB. After her involuntary outburst and a few minutes of heated argument, the management accepts her RMB.

We eat a pretty nondescript dinner, and return to the hotel to meet the 4th inhabitant of our 4-bed room. She is a West German girl named Birgette, traveling alone, with an unerring eye for bargain Chinese souvenirs. She spent an hour seeing Xi’an’s famous “Terra Cotta Soldiers,” an army of about 6,000 figures unearthed in 1974, and 2 hours at the souvenir stands accompanying them. Her corner of the room is filled with evidence of her China shopping sprees.

April 29: Another rainy, cold day. Very cold. So cold that I wear my long underwear that Glenn has been mocking me for bringing. He’s got a scratchy throat, so we leave him to sleep and go in search of meaning, or lunch, whichever comes first.

Xi’an seems pretty unremarkable, but we take a stroll through the market, with the usual interesting assortment of locals and their culinary exotica. We get a couple of flour tortilla things with spicy vegetables inside and gulp down a curious-tasting Chinese soda to offset the burning in our mouths. We rent bikes. We ride around. We get cold. We go home.

Glenn is rested and ready to eat. On the way to our eatery- search, we are sidetracked by the grinning proprietor of a nearby billiard table emporium. We rack ‘em up for a game of cutthroat while curious Chinese crowds gather.

We play remarkably mediocre pool to a capacity crowd, pay the outrageous fee of Y5, and go for dinner. Some arbitrary wandering through back alleys brings us to a suitable looking place, where we are treated to an unexpectedly tasty dinner of sprouts and onions under fried omelet and spicy beef and peppers in pita bread. Easily one of the best meals we’ve had in China.

We return to the hotel to hear all about Birgette’s latest bargains and do a bit of laundry. A lot of laundry, actually – none of my clothes have been cleaned since Hong Kong, and the hand-washing-in-a-bucket routine is tedious and time-consuming. A visit to the only available shower, a large communal room next door to the hotel, reinforces my appreciation of privacy; being stared at on the street is annoying at worst, but being stared at by a room full of Chinese in the shower is a bit unnerving. Appreciating cross- cultural differences: another step toward mutual understanding.