I’ll make this short and sweet.

Since I was unable to really sleep on our journey from Beijing to Shenyang, I was wide awake to take this picture. I wish my camera would work better under extreme circumstances – IE taking a picture of the bright sun through a window in a train that is traveling 120 KM per hour – but what can you do. I don’t think it came out too bad considering. At least you can tell what it was I was taking a picture of. The crazy part is that I took about ten pictures before I got this one. All the rest of them were blurry or too bright.

I miss the sun.

I haven’t seen it since the day after we arrived in Xiamen. It’s been rainy and craptastic ever since. It seems the sun is a seldom visitor in the south of China. Xiamen seems to be a lot like Fuyang in that regard. Even though it was cold, windy and dusty in Beijing, at least there was a big ball of fire on most days hanging above me in the vast blue sky. Heh. I guess I can’t be happy all the time. : ) The sun has to come out eventually,though. I’ve seen too many pictures of Xiamen to believe that it is perpetually overcast here. At least, I hope not.

As mentioned before, in multiple posts, we had to take a train from Beijing to get to our supposed final destination of Shenyang. Instead of getting a soft seat like we did to go from Hangzhou to Beijing(which I will never do again), we were provided with soft sleepers. The above picture is of the car we resided in for the 8 hour journey.

For the most part, it wasn’t that bad. The beds were soft enough to get comfortable in, but because of the constant shaking of the train, I had a horrible time getting some shut eye. Phil had a similar problem, but Christine was out cold as soon as she closed her eyes. Not long after the train pushed off, Phil tried taking a 360 of the room, but only this portion of it turned out. It shows the majority of the room anyway. The room was itzy bitzy(don’t let the picture fool you) and was barely big enough to put all of our luggage in it. Thankfully, Richard decided to take a plane to Shenyang, or else we wouldn’t have had a bed to lay everything on. Phil and I took the top bunks and Christine and all of our luggage took the bottom two.

Each bed came equipped with sheets, a pillow and a little reading light. To get to the top bunks though, one needed to be super agile. There were no stairs leading up to them. Instead, there was a little foot hold and a handle to pull yourself up. It’s much easier getting up than getting down – at least that is how it was for me. But, as I have seen since being in China – even the elderly Chinese are pretty darn flexible. I saw an old lady sitting flat footed, like it was natural. I don’t think I can name one elderly person back home that can do that. I think it is all the training they do throughout their lives to use the toilet here. I will never understand how they do it or want to do it.

And that is the low down on the sleeper car that we stayed in. I’ll be posting about our experiences so far in Xiamen soon. I just want to go ahead and post the things that have happened recently before I forget them. I have a few more pictures that I have saved on blogger to get to before I move on to Xiamen. Plus, I haven’t really had many picture opportunities since coming to Xiamen. The weather did a 180 the day after we got here. It’s been overcast and rainy every day since. We are in the rainy season, so I guess it is something I need to get used to. I just hope we are spared a typhoon. I don’t want to have to deal with one of those.

Well, that didn’t last very long.

Once again, my blog is blocked. I wish they would just decide one way or another – to block or not to block – and stop toying with me. I guess it is something that I should get used to if I decide to continue living in China.

But for now, I guess the waiting game begins again. If I want to view fellow blogspot blogs, I will have to find proxies that work well. I usually use www.pkblogs.com, but for some reason it is not working and hasn’t been for several days now. If anyone knows why, I would really appreciate it if you passed the word on to me. I can’t find any information about it online. Every time I go to pkblogs site, I get some weird message saying – No input file specified. I have no idea what that means and if the problem is State side or because of China.

Oh, well, at least I can still post. It just takes the fun out of reading when I have to jump through hoops to be a part of the blogasphere. At least people back home can take part in my life here in China. Ah, freedom, I never knew how sweet you were until I came here and the great firewall stood in my way.