Given our experiences with the buses so far, we set off to the train station at 10am to make sure that we got to the train station in plenty of time. Our departure time wasn't until 2pm and it's only 5km but the journey had taken well over and hour before and we wanted to leave time to pick up some food for the 18hr train journey.
We had hoped that 10am was too early for people to be leaving the parks and other tourist attractions along the route and for the first time in almost a week, the bus was not at all busy. This was a massive relief since our bags seem fuller than ever. We arrived with hours to spare and bags too big for taking them exploring.
We dawdled around the supermarket, taking pictures of entertaining signs and choosing what we wanted, before sitting outside for a bit of a picnic. We'd managed to avoid the disgusting sweet red bean paste that has plagued my search for meat-free food and found that we had bought discgustingly sweet bread instead. I'm beginning to think that nice bread was just a figment of my imagination. And even if it isn't, then I can't believe that I'm stupid enough to keep buying stuff that looks like bread. You can smell a sweet vanilla-like fragrance wafting from it whenever you bite into a long-anticipated sandwich, but it's hard to discern in the supermarket for some reason. And you can only sniff bread so much before you start to look very suspicious and gross!
At the train station it didn't take long to find out that our train didn't actually leave from the station we had booked the ticket at. It left from a station quite a long way away and no-one had bothered to mention it. We didn't even know there was another station somewhere and it was out of the area covered by any maps we had.
We spoke to a lady on the help desk and though she was actually helpful, we discovered that the station we needed was 'about an hour's bus-ride away'. As I mentioned earlier 5km by bus can take a long time and we had no idea where to catch the bus or how to say where we wanted to get off.
We spoke to a taxi driver and loaded our bags into the boot. He saw our anxiety and refused to use the meter and so we had to unload our bags again and move to the taxi behind. He also refused to use the meter at first (though he did ask for a third less money) but eventually relented. Taxi's use of meters in Hangzhou is quite strictly enforced and we didn't fancy being pulled over on the way. Especially since he was trying to rip us off in the first place as it only cost just over half what he was asking.
We got the the East Station still in plenty of time and sat around for an hour. When the train came we chucked our stuff on our beds and decided to relax over a game of cards for a change. We were half way through our first game when a lady came and started gesticulating at us to move our stuff. It turns out that not only did we get a ticket from a different station, we also had a different bed to the one our little Chinese note had stated we wanted. Instead of being in the middle bunk, we were in the top one, which incidentally, was closer to the ceiling than the luggage rack was so we had less room to sleep in than our bags! Also, it meant that when the occupants of the bottom bunk that we had to sit on decided to lie down at 7pm, we were forced onto our tiny shelf of a bed.
I will not miss Chinese trains and their usual cacophony of gross noises. People mindlessly crunching their way through big bags of sunflower seeds for hours and sucking the skin off chicken feet really does me in but there was toilet roll in the loos for once so it wasn't all bad.
Although they promptly turned the light off at 10pm, sleep was a lot longer coming and was quite hot and sticky. We tried to open the vent so it faced us but the guy in the bed under Matt was having none of it.
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