You Think You Know, But You Have No Idea...

Hey Guys,
I spent the weekend in Guilin and Yangsho, two Chinese cities that captured the essence of the word 'beauty.' Unfortunately, my image of both dreamlands has been somewhat tainted by my experience home on the bus that Hades built. Let me tell you a little bit about that so I can revisit the Chinese wonderlands with a proper perspective.
As you may or may not know, I have a whole lot of class each Monday, starting with a three- hour Understanding Culture in Modern Society course at 8 am. This timeslot has been the bain of my existence since the local students took a liking to Sunday-Night screamfests that resonate through my earplugs and keep me up each and every weekend. Here's to a fresh start to the week.
Anyway, participation in class is a significant portion of my grades here, so I have made a concerted effort to be present at all of them. To get home from Yangsho on an overnight bus for a morning class demanded meticulous planning. I had done my homework, and I had a solution. The plan was to depart Yangsho at 5 pm on an 11-hour journey, bringing me into Shenzen at 4am. That would give me plenty of time to get back to HKUST for my 8 o'clock class. Having lived in America my entire life, I budgeted a couple of extra hours into the schedule. You never know- some traffic or a wrong turn could easily add an hour onto the trip. That was wishful thinking...
After what I thought was a flawless negotiating exhibition, my travel mate Aaron and I had arranged to meet a new sleeper bus outside of the Happy Hotel in Yangsho on Sunday at 5pm. We had all our reciepts and documentation ready to go, and we waited on the street with our friend John- a South African mate we met on the boat trip from Guilin and I will tell you more about. Sleeper buses kept passing by, and we would be sure to give a wave at each of them. While it was hard to miss the only white faces in the city, we did not want to risk being left. All of our efforts were wasted as the buses continued to drive right past us.
Eventually, a woman working at the Happy Hotel and told us in her best English/Mandarin/sign language that the bus was running a little bit late. It would pick us up at six instead. No problem. We went and grabbed some Guilin rice noodles from a street vender and made it back to the Happy Hotel by six. Forty more minutes ticked by, and still no sign of a bus. Until...
Out of nowhere a motorbike pulled up and the women on the back screamed "Shenzen." Aaron and I nodded and before I could wet my pants, we were piled on the back of the bike, motoring in and out of city traffic.
Eventually, the driver swirved off to the side of the road and pointed at a bus waiting there. Finally, the coveted sleeper-bus that would take us home. We were instructed to take our shoes off upon entering the bus. I was feeling great. If they were going to make us take our shoes off, the bus had to be relatively clean- right?
I walked up the stairs and peered to my left. I could not have been less prepared for what I saw. The bus was the avevage width of a bus, except there were three rows of bunks with aisles in between. How the hell does one fit three rows of beds into that narrow of a space. Luckily, the beds were proportionately long (around 4 ft in length), with half of the bed tilted at 30 degrees. Having to sit in a bed this size for eleven hours would have been torturous, but the tale was just beginning. Lined in each of the aisles were local Chinese men, women and children packed like sardines. Their positions on the floor, in conjunction with their facial features, reminded me of the first scene in Amistad on the slave ships. I noticed one empty bed on the left hand side. The man at the front pointed to it and Aaron hopped on after navigating through the sea of people lining the floor. He pointed to the me and then to a bed next to Aaron. I was convinced that he wanted me to claim the bed, but there was one problem- there was already a woman on my bed. The man pushed the lady off the bed and instructed me to sit. The bus started moving, I could not have been less comfortable, and the women next to me had cultivated a deep-rooted hatred for me in under twenty seconds. Perfect.
The bus trip consistantly provided tales of horror. A few of the highlights are as outlined below:

The woman next to me decided to play a little game of Command and Conquer on my bed. From her perch to my immediate left, the Chinese woman who I had ousted from her "bed" made herself comfortable on my lap. Honestly, it was a no-holds-barred struggle between us. When she thought I wasn't flexing my legs, she would maneuver her body in between my legs, on top of my knees- you name it. Finally, I settled with her head on my knee and her arm extending underneath my buckled kneecaps (try to visualize it)

Aaron got in a heated smoking debate with the front of the bus. Despite being in undoubtably cramped quarters, the local people still had the urge to light up. Aaron, in a last ditch effort to breath, opened his window. The man in front of Aaron did not appreciate this move as much as my lungs did. Back-and-forth they went; when the cigarettes came out, Aaron opened the window, prompting the man in front of him to slam it shut. It was quite amusing.

At one in the morning, our bus came to a halt on the side of the road. We were stopped for two hours as a construction crew decided they wanted to close the road. That's when Aaron and I started to speak Spanish. As confident as we were that nobody on the bus spoke English, we were even more certain that they didn't have Spanish in their language repitoir. After two hours, the bus started the engine, and we were back on the road. I guess that's pretty standard operating procedure.

Once in Shenzen, the bus turned into a jungle gym for the passengers. Constant hollers to the driver and asses in my face summarized the experience of locals climbing out of this clown bus. What I found intriguing was the fact that people would get out anywhere. I don't mean on the side of the road anywhere; people were getting out in the middle of ten lane highways and running to the side. Which reminds me- there was one point when our bus was traveling in the wrong direction of a ten-lane highway.

The icing on the cake. Upon exiting the bus, we soon realized that we weren't at the bus station we were familiar with. Instead, we got dropped off at a bus station forty minutes away from the railway station. Luckily, the city was bigger than New York and nobody speaks English.

I got back onto campus around noon. My name is Kevin Slemp, and that was the longest day of my life.