Train Station (Wednesday)

Rainbow and the girls play games while waiting for the train.

We traveled the five minutes or so from the restaurant to the train station, which was very crowded and chaotic. Getting through the initial security scan was frantic, with literally hundreds of people trying to squeeze through two checkpoints similar to the TSA baggage screening machines at airports in the U.S. It was nuts. We tossed our baggage onto the conveyor and walked through a metal detector, then tried to grab our stuff at the other end along with dozens of other people at the same time. I can’t imagine the check really accomplished much. Once we arrived in the enormous waiting area and found a place to wait, we discovered that the train we’d arrived an hour early for was going to depart 30 minutes late. Great. Over an hour and a half in a crowded waiting area that lacked air conditioning. Rainbow entertained the girls, and they entertained her for the next hour or so. Then they announced that the train would be further delayed, now departing more than an hour later than the originally scheduled time. That meant we would not be arriving in Nanchang until well after midnight. Poop.

Once we actually started boarding the train it only took about five minutes or so to get the mass of people waiting in the station on board. I was impressed with how fast it all happened.

As of this writing we are en route to Nanchang. The train is comfortable and we have a lot more room than if we were traveling by air. But the point of going by train was to see the countryside and since we left so late it is now well after dark and we can’t see anything in the windows other than our own reflections and occasionally a few lights outside.