China Travels: Beware of Buses Edition

So our next adventure would take us on a four hour bus ride the ghetto country.  Just Jack dropped us off at the bus station and told us how to get on and the whole shabang. We had the first two aisle seats on the bus.  It was greyhound-esque in style.  That is, if the greyhound bus was built in 1974 and had been attacked by landfills 15 times in the last month.  Other than that... it was great.

Since I was sitting in the aisle seat, right behind the driver, I had a completely unobstructed view of the terror that is chinese driving.  I nearly screamed out loud on multiple occasions.

You see, in the U.S. giant buses tend to not PASS others on two lane roads.  We played chicken with 18- wheeler container trucks more than I'd like to say.  And then one time our bus driver took a phone call... and yelled... a lot....

 classic.   I seriously thought that I was going to meet my Creator via chinese bus crash- alas, we did no such thing.  I'll see you later, Creator.

Fancy Lancy (factory gimp) and Mama Wong (owner) picked us up from the bus station. Mama Wong (named so because she is the cutest little grandma business owner B.A. you ever did see! ) was dressed to the nines, so much more fashionable than many of her American counterparts!   She didn't speak a lick of english, but she loved to smile!

It was around lunch time so they took us to an ITALIAN restaurant for lunch.  You cannot imagine how excited I was for this ! The owner came over and talked to us, all was grand.  He told us that they used to send their chefs to Italy to learn how to cook, but then the chef's wouldn't come back to china so now they send them to Shanghai ! 

We asked Fancy Lancy and Mama Wong if they like Italian food, they both answered NO but said they bring their customers there because its what Americans tend to like !

Factory tour, ya da ya da ya da... business meetings.... Bettie driving hard bargains.  The standard.

After the business was done, they took us to the train station for our train to Hangzhou.  We had stopped by earlier for Fancy Lancy to help buy us tickets for a train.  Bettie told her we wanted to best tickets there were.  This translated into two top bunk sleeper car tickets.

Mama Wong and Fancy Lancy sat with us at the train station while we waited for our chariot to arrive.  Mama Wong just couldn't stand not buying us something so she got us so giant bottles of water, to remember her by.  Our train was about to arrive so the four of us went outside to find our spot on the platform.  When it pulled up, Mama Wong and Fancy Lancy got on with us to help us find our car.  They opened up the door to our "room" to find a woman sleeping in one bottom bunk and a man reading a magazine in the other. Neither spoke ANY english.  Side note: there is circa de NO ROOM in train cars for big luggage.  There is usually a luggage rack, UP IN THE AIR.  So it was a really special bonding moment with the Chinese man while we tried to hike our luggage up there.   The train whistle blew waay before we were settled in and Mama Wong and Fancy Lancy had to run off the train so they wouldn't get swept away with us.  I looked out the train window to see the waving good-bye, laughing .  Mama Wong knew we were in for a treat !

to be continued...