Xi'an -- Bad seats

As I mentioned, October 1st was National Day (which is Chinese 4th of July) so we had the week off of work.  To celebrate, I went with some friends to Xi'an.  Xi'an is the ancient city that was the capital of China for almost 2,000 years (I think) and home of the famous terra-cotta warriors of Qin and other terra-cotta figurines, or as I like to call them, the clay dudes.  I had been once before but only for a day and a half so I hadn't seen anything but the Qin warriors and briefly around the inner city.
As you may have guessed, I am now returned.  However, the traveling was extremely brutal.  In fact the worst traveling I have had to do in a very long time, if ever.  I will continue blogging about the amazing trip as the week progresses but I am currently so exhausted that all I will show now is exactly how bad of a travel it was.
Let me draw a picture.  Trains in China are not like trains in the US or Europe.  They are somewhere in between Europe and India, leaning far towards the India side.  It is almost impossible to get the tickets you want on a holiday because of all the other travelers, so we could only get tickets for hard seats.  Which was actually very lucky.  Because it's a 30 hour train ride.  And they selling standing room tickets.  That's right, they crowd the train to twice capacity with most of the people only having STANDING TICKETS FOR 30 HOURS.
So, you get to the train station, stand in a huge like, rush to the front like a maniac, with people actually getting into fights to get there, try to find your seat which someone is inevitably already in, kick them out and settle down.  Because you will not be moving -- and I mean it, not even standing -- for at least 10 hours.  The train is so packed with "standing tickets" that you cannot stretch, stand up, store your luggage, go to the ::extremely nasty:: bathroom, anything.  Eventually around hour 10 they started to deboard and around hour 20 we were able to steal some sleepers and crowd into there for the remaining 10 hours.  Which was nice, because on the way out some asshole decided to bring a 22" flatscreen with him and store it in our leg room in the hard seats.  So not only could we not stand up, we could not, literally could not, move our legs.

Yep, Jenn was pretty grumpy.

How do you fit this many people in one train car?  Just you wait.

This is not a dramatization, this is literally the first 10 hours of the train ride.

The trip back was essentially the same, only no TV box THANK GOD and friendly English speaking neighbors, but no sleepers either.  We almost didn't make it back because the train was so late that we barely made the last connecting speed train from Guanzhou to Shenzhen, had to battle violently pushy Chinese to get the tickets and then runnnnn to board the departing train.  It was as close as it possibly could be.  We didn't get back home until after midnight, and then up again the next day at 6:30am to teach because in China they have this hellish idea that it's ok to work and have school on the weekends if you just had a holiday.  Nooooo.  I do not remember what I taught that day, and I'm still exhausted!
Ok, that's my ranting about the god awful train travel to Xi'an.  I promise, it's the last of my complaints about the trip because the resting of it was AWESOME.  I was lucky to go with some great people, which almost cancelled out the hellish seats.  Almost.