playing catchup, staaaarting with Changchun

I am finally back in Songyuan. And now I have two and a half weeks' worth of incredible experiences to recount and hundreds upon hundreds of pictures to sort through. It's a little overwhelming, so I'm just starting at the beginning and trying to finish at least one major post a day. We'll see how that goes... hopefully the internet cooperates...

I started my trip right after Dragon Boat Festival; I was supposed to fly out of Changchun on the following Monday. Midday on the Friday of Dragon Boat, my school told me the rest of my classes for the weekend were cancelled. Because I teach adults, when there are holidays class is usually cancelled. Everyone else has to work because holidays mean kids have more free time. Had I known about the cancellation ahead of time (my school certainly should have), I could have left for my trip three days earlier, but oh well.

Initially, a Chinese friend and I were going to go to Changchun after I finished teaching Sunday afternoon to do some shopping, visit another friend and spend the night before I took off Monday morning. He ended up bailing on me last minute, so I asked a student/friend of mine to help me buy my train ticket there instead. The trains in Songyuan don't run on a set schedule week to week and don't have an English website with times listed (yay, small town in China), so it's always fun trying to buy train tickets, especially day of.

We got to the train station maybe an hour and a half before when I thought there was sometimes a train (1pm). The 1pm train turned out to be sold out; there was also a 2pm and 3pm train, so my student bought me a ticket for the 2pm train.

She was absolutely adorable, she went all mama bear on me and was so worried for me at the train station. She kept going up to teenagers (more likely to speak English) asking them if they would help me find my train, my seat, Changchun, my friend's apartment, etc. After getting me through security, she went up to a security guard to basically ask him to babysit me as well.

After talking to him, it turned out that she had bought me a ticket on the slow train, which takes four hours instead of two (bleh, neither of us had even known there WAS a slow train to Changchun) and that there weren't assigned seats, so it would be a mad dash onto the train. After pestering him for a good 30 or 45 minutes, she convinced him to let me board the train ten minutes early. He would let me through the gate when another train was boarding and then walk me to my train to make sure I had the right one and got a great seat. It seemed like as good a plan as I was likely to get, but then at about ten to 1pm, he found me a ticket with an assigned seat on an air conditioned car for the sold out 1pm fast train! Hooray for amazing friends and people being unjustifiably worried for me. Mine student even called me later in the afternoon to make sure I had found my friend's apartment alright.

When I got to Changchun, I went through the usual hell of getting a taxi to my friend's apartment, it took literally almost an hour just to hail one. Taxis are notoriously hard to in Changchun, especially if you're foreign, it's ridiculous.

We went out with some other foreigners that night, nothing too exciting; good times were had by all and I was off to Siem Reap, Cambodia at 8am the next morning!

This gem was a block down the the train station.

Random fashion show near my friend's apartment.

Yep, THAT trend is international.