Oct. 25- Day 2 on the Train

I woke up at 7:30 to the view of small hills and country landscape. As on the Silk Road trip, I was glad to see the country and be out of the city again. Selina woke up a few hours later and we had bananas, banana bread, and tangerines for breakfast. After we ate I laid back down and read more of "The Stand." It's funny what random thoughts pop into your head when you've been on a train for 13 hours. As I lay there reading I thought "tennis shoes... did I bring tennis shoes?" I looked over my book and did a mental check of my bags and then I had an image of my shoes laying in my apartment back in Shanghai. That quadruple check of my stuff really paid off :) I told Selina that I forgot my tennis shoes and she reminded me that it was snowing in Lhasa. It reminded me of the time I went to see Grams and Albuquerque was having a really bad snowstorm and I showed up in flip-flops. I could just hear her giving me the same lecture as I sat there on the train! I was just glad that I forgot my shoes and not my passport or travel permits. Then we would have been in real trouble.

We stopped in Xi'an around 10 AM and got out to stretch and run around before we had to get back on the train. It felt so good to stand in a vertical position! We also got excited because now we can say that we've been to Xi'an twice. We ate our snacks for lunch to tide us over until the dining car opened for dinner. I read my book most of the day and made about a 200 page dent in it. It's so long it looked like I hadn't read anything! Before we left I bought a few more books to bring with me for when I finished "The Stand." The one I looked forward to the most was a collection of Hawthorne's short stories. Selina read this for a while and after she finished "The Minister's Black Veil" she asked me why the minister wore the veil and I just laughed. I had such a complicated answer for that question that I didn't even try to respond so I just said "That's the question isn't it?" She said she wants me to read it again on the trip and give her an English major's perspective on it. I'll probably end up boring her to death :) Later in the afternoon we played cards. We are both pretty pathetic in the knowledge of card games so we played Crazy 8s, Go Fish, and Black Jack. It's sad, I know. At least we didn't resort to playing War though! After a while I came up with a card trick, or maybe not so much a card trick but a way to entertain ourselves. It was really stupid and didn't make any sense whatsoever but we both found it to be very entertaining and hilarious. I think being on the train for about 24 hours at that point had something to do with our extremely easily entertained minds. We ate dinner in the dining car around 6:30 and then came back to the compartment to read. Our bunkmates got off around 9 PM in a city we didn't know so we had the whole compartment to ourselves for the rest of the trip.

24 hours down, 24 to go!!!