Our bus from Dandong to Tonghua in Jilin province provided us with some amazing views - for once our driver had to drive slowly because of the extremely rough roads, which made our sightseeing even more enjoyable - and even allowed us to get some decent picks through the day.
We had originally planned to stay overnight in Tonghua, because we weren't sure we'd make it in time for a connecting train, but we did so with not too much hassle at all, we changed our tickets, and were on the train to Baihe under 2 hours later. Just enough time to fill up our bellies!For once we were not the centre of attention on the train. When we hopped on the train, the woman across from Liv was silently crying. We wondered what was wrong, until it evolved into a full scale breakdown, complete with wails, singing, and some other odd behaviour. Somewhere between her tears, we started talking, but Liv's language skills let her down and soon our neighbour was convinced we were ignoring her because we didn't like her - this prompted her to move seats away from us, muttering something like "they pretend they can't understand me".
A couple of stops later the attention was moved even further away from us as a group of deaf friends hopped on the train. With their captivating smiles, laughs and general happy attitudes there were soon pieces of paper floating around the carriage facilitating conversations. When Liv wrote New Zealand in Chinese on the back of one of our postcards, they were absolutely stoked, and this prompted a joyful period of hand gesture-led conversation, and lots of fun!We arrived in Baihe about 10.30pm and were led to a hotel just across the road - perfect!
Adlibing it away from the usual stares.
No comments:
Post a Comment