Part of a series of posts detailing my adventures in China exactly one year ago (give or take a day!).

Extract from my journal:
Tuesday 6th March 2007

Here we are on the sleeper train somewhere in the middle of China, en route from Xi’an to Wuhan, from which we will head to to Suizhou to visit Greg’s in-laws in their village. It’s nice to have more time to chat with the group – I went through to the dining carriage and joined Greg, Jessica, Alex (“Macky”) and Patrick for a beer, which was actually quite nice. Greg is a really interesting character – in in the sixties was thrown out of Cambridge University for a year for painting “Free Mandela” on one of the chapels before most people had even heard of Nelson Mandela, went to Italy and joined the Communist Party there! And of course married a Chinese lady at some point, hence the relatives we’ll soon be visiting.

The train is moving again. This morning we went to the Provincial Museum, which was fairly interesting. We were left to get out own lunch, and a bunch of us went to KFC! Siobhan enjoyed tucking in to a chicken. She started out the trip as a vegetarian, but the difficulty of maintaining a vegetarian diet in China, along with a bit of a counter-reaction to Jessica’s more militant vegetarianism, has led to her chucking in the towel.

First thing in the morning, I did some election stuff online including talking to my housemates on Messenger. Ian thought it was funny to drop in words like “democracy”, “Taiwan”, “Tiananmen Square” and so on into conversation! I’m rather apprehensive about handling everything when I get back – jet-lag, my uni work, campaigning. I guess I need to depend on God and trust it will work out best as he plans, even if that isn’t necessarily what I might want or expect.

We began this train journey early afternoon, so we’ve got a lot more waking hours on board than our previous journey. Greg organised a Chinese lesson for us, so we all bundled in to one of the compartments with our language textbooks. We practised asking and giving directions – the people on the train must have been quite bemused to hear a bunch of Westerners chanting phrases like “The toilet is on the left hand side” in unison in Chinese! We’ve not had as much chance to practise our Chinese as I might have hoped, but hopefully the trip to Suizhou will be a bit less touristy.