I'm drafting this as I stare out the train window at rural China--all farmland, from the looks of it. Run-down brick houses pop up occasionally, but mainly there's this incredibly varied farmscape. It's so different from Illinois! First and foremost, they have those fabled terraces carved out of the hillsides! Some are filled with shallow water, maybe to grow rice? Also, these farms are far from the massive monocultures of the Midwest. A single acre can hold multiple crops. And each farm is customized to fit the landscape, since the terraces hug each hill and are mixed with presumably strategic rows of trees. Boy am I glad of this last point because I woke up early when it got light out specifically to look out the window, and I would have been pretty annoyed if it turned out to be Southern Illinois Part Two. Bonus, I saw the first blue sky of our trip so far! Smog in Beijing, light rain AND smog in Xi'an obscured the sky every day so far.

Good train ride. It's been pretty pleasant actually... haven't ventured into the bathroom since the very beginning, but there's less B.O., the baby sleeping below me did not wake up screaming, and the AC is blasting, so I slept well.

Side note re:the baby: It arrived on my bunk screaming, making me think "Damn, we are SCREWED for sleep," but one look at my luminous white face quieted it. I gladly gave it a polka-dotted journal of mine to play with, and it didn't cry again even once. Comforting babies is only one of the many magical powers my whiteness endows me with in China... more on that later!

Also, minor victory! Before Sally woke up I managed to ask a dude if the food cart had already come by with breakfast!! It was more like "That thing to buy food came? I can buy food now this morning?" but hey, at least I got results: I could tell he clearly responded that a food cart has and hasn't come by yet.

So the sleeper trains have worked out great so far, although Sally said the hard seat section (which has the cheapest tickets and is where the truly poor sit) is just horrific. Back in the day she once bought a standing room-only ticket for that section for a 20-minute train ride, and people were peeing IN THE TRAIN CAR. Whew, I'm so happy the train is segregated by wealth! ... I'm just like those snotty people in Titanic. :( Still, peeing IN the train??

(break to stare out the window more)

Okay, corn spotting confirmed! I swear we just passed a little stand of corn. Trust me, I know corn. Oh! There it went again. I feel so at home now.

So that's what the overnight trains are like! I'll come back to describing Beijing and Xi'an in the next post, later today. Plus, teaser! I'm hoping to write about all the cool food we've had, with pictures, if we find an internet cafe! For example, we had noodles that were rolled out, cut, boiled and stir-fried in front of us while we waited in a small street in Xi'an's famous Muslim quarter. :)

Becca