Urumqi is the most remote city in the world, by distance from an ocean. It's actually the middle of nowhere. But for some reason 90 trains over 10 days had no sleeping compartments, and no seats. I can't believe I put myself through the hell of standing in hard class again.
I won't linger on that unfortunate experience too much. It was similar to my first terrible train ride. I spent the first night crammed in an aisle of sweaty stinky people, catching no sleep. I went to the dining car in the morning for over 24 hours, paying for food and, in between meal times, paying for the privelege of having a seat, 20 yuan each time. Best three dollars I could've possibly spent at the time.
There were a few notable parts to this ride though. One was that the dining car served no beer. I was able to play some games with Uighurs on the train: the simple game of Sevens with a family in my assigned car, and later in the dining car with some other strangers, plus pente with a young kid who was evenly matched with me, except for his father telling him where to put pieces to beat me.
Something I noticed about Chinese people that really pronounced itself throughout these games is that many Chinese don't possess the concept of waiting turns. You can see it in "lines" at train stations, and each time I played Sevens - a game where players take turns laying down cards - there was at least one guy, usually older, who kept putting cards down out of order, no matter how many times the other players told him how stupid he was for forgetting about turns.
The train cars were the standard scenes: humans crammed without dignity against each other, people sleeping on the filthy floor underneath seats, visible only by their protruding feet, and complete apathy toward any posted restrictions: spitting, smoking, littering.
The greatest abomination of the ride came when we were approaching Urumqi through the vast beautiful wasteland of western China. The train had emptied a fair amount so that most people had seats.
A car attendant began sweeping up all the trash that had accumlated on the ground like revolting leaves in a foul autumn. Processed "sausage" wrappers, greasy foam meal trays, fruit rinds, cigarette butts. The sight made me happy. I appreciate order and cleanliness, and the joy of seeing something wrong made right.
A great mound was forming, and passengers began to help him by sweeping under their own seats. The mountain of trash gradually moved down the car from one end to the other, and the floor became visible.
A warm stench of rot faintly wafted through the air from the old upturned garbage, but I ignored it, preferring to rejoice in the act of cleaning. My pleasure didn't last long. When the trash mountain finally reached the far end of the car, the attendant, with the help of other passengers pushed it into the vestibule and out the open door, scattering two days worth of 100 people's garbage out into the air as the train rushed through the desert.
It was truly revolting. Not just a slovenly passenger throwing a box of trash out of the window, but an employee of the train line, a representative of the government, and a citizen of the land he was polluting had just scattered dozens of pounds of trash across the land, and the same thing was presumably happening in the fifteen other cars of the train, and on the other 90 trains over the next ten days that came this way.
It was the easily the most appaling thing I saw in all of China, and that's no small claim.
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