Day 14 - 25 Apr, Saturday: 桂林>杭州

The whole of Saturday was spent on the train cause the whole train journey was more than 24 hours. I reached Hangzhou finally at around 3.45am. I thought i would be pretty bored on the train and even bought a book to read when i was in 桂林 but i didn't read it in the end cause i was pretty occupied throughout the whole trip, trying to update my travel journal. I even had the luxury of an afternoon nap. That's the advantage of buying a sleeper ticket.

The whole trip became more exciting in the evening. There was this little girl (yep, the sweet little girl in the pic) who came up the train with her mother at one of the stops in the evening and she was offering me melon seeds. And soon after, she was even removing the shells for me and feeding me. Even my dear Baoling dun do that to me. I felt really fortunate to have such a pretty little girl feeding me. Haha.

While trying to take a photo of me and her together, i attracted the attention of the train conductor. Anyway, it was hard to take a decent pic cause the lighting was pretty poor and i didn't want to use flash, so the pic above has its levels adjusted. The train conductor was looking at the photos in my camera soon after and asking me questions about the camera and the places i've visited over the past 2 weeks. So one thing led to another and soon he knew i was from Singapore. He said that he was very interested in Singapore and wanted me to tell him more about it.

He had quite a lot of questions about Singapore too and it seems that Singapore is often mentioned in the press, and our MM is very respected by the Chinese. Soon, he was even talking about China politics, and he wasn't even keeping tone down and i had this thought that i might not be able to get off the train. But of course, nothing of that sort happened in the end and we ended our rather long conversation when the lights on the train went off.

And then i had a conversation with a student from 福州大学 who was going for an interview at 舟山. He was the first Chinese from 福建 that i've talked to actually. He had some links with Singapore too cause his mother went to 打黑工 in Singapore before and he had a cousin studying in a boys' school in Singapore too. I felt guilty about asking him what is 打黑工 but i really didn't know at the time but he was ok with it lar. 

These two conversations did made me feel privileged to be a citizen of a safe and prosperous country like Singapore although i'm not completely contented with living there.