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Other entries in Xi'an

The Prison Train

We woke up about 9ish and thnakfully Alex was feeling better, so we had the all clear for the train ride to Yichang later in the day.  As Alex hadn't actaully been out of our room for the entire stay in Xi'an and there wasnt time for him to visit the Terracotta army, we decided to just have a potter around town during the day and sort out some odds and ends as we couldnt really be bothered to do anything else.

We paid our second visit to a chemists and tried to say anti-inflammatory in sign language!?!  Dont quite know how we managed it, but i managed to get some horrible green cream to put on my mosquito bite that was forming into a third arm (a bit like anna's in moscow).  After all that, i realised i could have just used the amndarin phrasebook i had in my daysack, but that would have been too logical for me.

We then got a bite to eat and i sent yet another package (of books and souvenirs) back home which has lightened my load significantly.  Although, now the only books i have to read are the ones ackroyd and alex have read (one about paedophile gangsters and one by Jeremy Clarkson), although at the speed Ackroyd reads, i feel i might be lucky enough to avoid the latter!  One very annoying thing happened today....I found out that i can only use my Nationwide card at Bank of China branches, so after being rejected from about ten ATM's and having walked half way around the city i finally managed to get enough cash to last me a goos while as i dont know when the next time i will find one of these banks will be.

We boarded our third-class hard seats on the train (16 hours) Yichang bound at 6.10pm, and it was rats!  Me and Ackroyd found it so funny that we had to share a seat with two other people crammed on for that duration of time (if we hadnt have laughed, we would have been driven insane), but Alex being Mr 5-star was absolutely disgusted with it and wlaked off in search of an upgrade, stating that he would rather get off the train and wait 4 days for a sleeper train!!!!  Lo and behold.....half an hour later, Alex made his way back to us with a huge grin on his chops, he had managed to get us an upgrade to hard sleepers (only 5 quid extra), so he was a happy lad.  The only problem now was that we had to take our bags back off the crammed luggage racks, and make our way down the train to our new carriage (11 carriages away) through the carmmed third-class section.  Needless to say we got all the customary stares from the locals bemused as to why we had white skin and also the beautiful sight of many chinese people spitting on the train floor!!!  The people here really are disgusting.

We arrived at our sleepers to find that they werent a great deal better....they were pretty grubby and my bed was covered in little bed bug/lice things which i was over the moon about (good job i had a sleeping bag liner on me).  It was now that Alex named this train the prison train, stating that the conditions were worse than a prison in England (well, he must have learned something from all those heart to hearts with Bezza!!).  Not only was the train horrifically dirty, we got ousted from the restaurant carriage, the lights in our carriage didnt work, we shared our little compartment with three snorers (one particularly loud) and they ate like pigs (really loud and spitting bits all over the place).

Oh yeah....and it was red hot and the fan didnt work.....needless to say we didnt get a great deal of sleep!!!  We will put this one down to experience.

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