14 Hours

Hong Kong, China

What do 14 hours mean to you? My next major stop is Hong Kong. I'm crossing into Hong Kong Special Administrative District from Shenzhen on foot because express trains from Guangzhou or Shenzhen itself are expensive. On foot I can just take the MTR on the other side of the check point.
14 hours is the time it takes from Hangzhou down to Shenzhen by train. It's the over-night train. What I hadn't known is that it's the time students go home for holidays. So when I went to the ticket office at Hangzhou West Station there were no sleeping berths left. No seats either. I must have been out of my mind when I told the clerk to go ahead and sell me a 无坐 (no seat) ticket. How bad could it be?
I also didn't expect that there would be hardly any floor space left either. Imagine this: All seats occupied, some shared by two people, people standing or sitting on most of the available floor space; the over-head racks, the space under and sometimes between seats and a lot of the remaining floor occupied by luggage. Even if you have a seat you hardly have space for your feet. You end up more cowering than sitting, cramped together into a bundle. And thus the train races off into the night.
At times like these I'm impressed with the stoic patience with which Chinese people bear these conditions. Of course, what can you do unless you can afford the expensive express trains? I can't (it's not in the budget) and the other people in the coach can't either. So, what would you do with 14 hours if you had hardly enough space to think?
The first few hours are all very well. You chat a bit, you have a bowl of noodles and some tea, you listen to some music. A cute student girl offered to share her seat with me, so I sat on the corner of her seat for a while - with her soon falling asleep against my shoulder.
The next few hours start getting longer. You're tired because you've been out and about all day. But you can't sleep with nothing supporting your head and only half your butt on the seat. Your neck starts getting stiff. Songs start repeating. I felt bad for taking up the girl's seat. After all, she had paid good money for it. So, I moved to the floor. When you're so exhausted you don't care anymore who might have spit on it. If you wedge your feet under the opposite row of seats just so and lean your head against the edge of the seat behind you like so, it's actually quite comfortable. Just that every now and again you have to move because people want to go to the toilet or to get water. Conversations have died down. Most people have dozed off.
Then time really goes into slo-mo. Minutes drag on like hours. Your music becomes tedious because it's always the same. You feel you've listened to every track at least ten times before. Sometimes you doze off for a few minutes but keep waking up because of the uncomfortable position. You just wish you could fall asleep and wonder how all the other people in the coach do it. You keep glancing at the clock. You're happy when you pass the half-way point. But after an eternity and a half there are still five more hours to go. By this time I had ended up lying rolled up on the floor, my head resting on the small backpack. All reservations about dirt had gone out the window.
The last three or so hours I spent in a daze. I think I actually fell asleep for a while. Then people started waking up again and getting their morning noodles. Of course, this happens just when you feel you've gotten comfortable.
In the end, I somehow managed to drag my luggage out of the train. I even chatted with a girl I had met when helping her with her luggage. She had come down to Shenzhen to see a friend. We decided to have breakfast together but when I came back from depositing my backpack for the day she had disappeared. Just as well, since sleep was the foremost thing on my mind anyway.