Tears of Joy

Train Tickets

All Aboard! We boarded the train from Yichang, Hubei province to Beijing. Our tickets had been purchased for us by our Yichang No.1 Middle School Foreign Teacher Administrator. We were told that our return tickets would have to be purchased in Beijing. We were unaware that Frank had been assigned room number 3 and I was allocated 13. Being separated from my husband so early in our overseas excursion made me uncomfortable so I sat patiently on Frank’s bunk until the conductor found a way to have us travel the 17-hour journey in the same room. 

After we shared conversation with a young Chinese girl and her mother, I fell asleep to the repetitive clacking sound of the train rolling along the tracks.

Soft Sleeper

The next morning, we sipped on tea and ate oranges with our roommates. From the window I admired the view of corn stacked on the top of houses, posted signs in Chinese characters, old buildings, vehicles of various makes and sizes and workers along the train tracks. Some picked up garbage with bare hands while others used large chopsticks. It appeared that everyone was working at something or travelling from some place to somewhere. We passed a graveyard, cornfields and buildings crumbling because of the pollution. Those scenes became very familiar to us in China.

Once in Beijing, we located a room at the Beijing Rainbow Hotel. Our biggest surprise was that there were no mattresses on the beds. In most Chinese motels or hotels, you sleep on a box spring. We chomped on bananas and headed out the door.

Air China tickets

At the train ticket office we were told that there we no return tickets to Yichang for at least two weeks. Our stay was to be for one week and so we were forced to purchase China Air passages to Yichang. From that point we headed to the Forbidden City museum.

Tears of bliss fell down my cheeks as I entered the enormous grounds of the once imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. I was overwhelmed by the majestic detail and that Frank and I had journeyed from Port Hardy, British Columbia to China.

Teaching English as second language was one impressive aspect of our expedition, equal to the discovery of everything Chinese we could absorb.

Imperial Palace Museum ~ Beijing, China