Monday, August 21, 2006
16.8.06
Wednesday, 10amWe just spent 8 hours on a Chinese train from Beijing to the seaside town of qingdao. It was a pretty trying trip. The seats were close together and not the most comfortable things to try and get sleep on, and knowing that they were probably really grotty as well helped nothing. But, it was quite enjoyable in that we were mostly in the same carriage and so got to talk loads. I was sitting with Jordan, Katie, Naomi, geoff, Carmen and Rachel endersby. Rachel swapped with Claire later so that we could play mafia. It was the most intense game of mafia that I’d played, ever. I’m so used to playing it with my class in that totally random, over-in-2-minutes way that i’d completely forgotten how analytical and interesting the game could be. Jordan said that he knew of people who’d actually fallen out because of mafia. I can kind of see how that could happen.
Besides playing mafia, we also got to evangelise a family sitting across from whitney and lorna on the train. The man was a journalist with a small local newspaper, and he and his wife and baby daughter were traveling to some town just short of qingdao. The kid was really cute and lorna and whitney got to carrying her, at which point Geoff irrelevantly suggested that she was called Jane, which immediately got taken up as a suggestion to give her an English name. giving people English names is a fantastic way of evangelizing them. Jordan got out his bible and we went through the works—Deborah, sarah, Hannah, esther, etc. finally we settled on mary, cos that would give us the best excuse to tell the Christmas story and the whole death and resurrection bit. It worked. The guy was thrilled that westerners were naming his kid, and that there was a story behind the name too. Being the only Chinese speaker, I had the privildege of telling the story—as usual, completely badly and losing elephants in translation, but thank god that his word is indestructible, even when brutally corrupted by incompetent mandarin speakers like myself. The guy got the message I think. In true ISEC style, someone suddenly produced a Chinese bible which “just happened” to be laying at the top of someone’s suitcase in the top suitcase of the entire pile, and we gave it to the man. we wrote a note in the front, saying that we were happy to have met him and that we hoped Mary would one day come to read the bible and find out the origins of her name. I exchanged email and land addresses with him, and he even promised to send me a box of dragonfruits for some strange reason or other. Apparently, his hometown is the number one spot for dragonfruit production.
On the whole, it was a fun experience. it was like the beida yiyuan expedition, where you got the full Chinese experience, rubbing shoulders with the locals. It was chaotic while it lasted—the time at the train station was horrendous, what with all 40 something of us waiting on a really grotty pavement with all our bags and thousands of smelly, noisy, rushing people pushing past us and porters and vendors assaulting us from all corners and everybody staring at us for being the weird, out of place, backpacking foreign kids htat we were. But somehow, I think experiences like that are the most bonding. The whole randomness of every situation, and the way we stick out like a sore thumb, and how, even on the train, or at the spa place, I feel like we stick out for more reason than that half of us are white. There is just this air of difference and joy and refreshing that seems to emanate from the group when we walk around together, and I am convinced that that is what makes people stop and watch.
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