Late last night, Kel booked me a trip to Xiamen for today. Specifically, this was to Xiamen Railway Station, in the middle of Xiamen, but from Guangzhou East Railway Station instead of Guangzhou South Railway Station, where I had arrived from. Yes, cities have multiple railway stations within the China-wide high speed railway network. Also, my return trip is on Monday afternoon and goes from Xiamen North Railway Station (and not Xiamen Railway Station where I arrived from), and goes to Guangzhou South Railway Station (instead of Guangzhou East where I had left from). Got all that?

Me neither. I think Kel is toying around with me. (This was the cheapest and most reasonable route though, in actuality, and I can navigate around in both cities using the local railway just fine.)

We had picked Xiamen for two reasons — one was that Xiamen was in Fujian province, where the Hokkien dialect (which our family uses) comes from and also likely where some of our ancestors were from in the past, since a lot of Singaporeans seem to be from around that area, we think. So it would be vaguely like an ancestral visit. Next, Xiamen was picked over the other cities (like larger Fuzhou) because it was nearer to where Guangzhou was by a significant margin and so the train journey there and back would be cheaper. I could have used a plane there and back too, but a train was significantly cheaper, and I love riding trains in general, whereas I want lesser plane rides in my life, not more.

One other reason I did not state is that Xiamen was one of the many options that I was considering as a gateway from North America to Asia anyway, as I had discovered that there apparently is an airline called Xiamen Air that is fairly cheap and that flies from various ports in North America to Xiamen (and a few other cities in China), and then Xiamen (and a few other cities in China) to other cities in Asia. In addition, it helps facilitate a program (local) that allows visitors to stop over and even experience China for up to 6 days without actually needing to apply for and obtain a Chinese visa, which I thought was really cool. I had never actually even heard of Xiamen before finding that out though, so I had no idea what sort of place Xiamen was, and I figured that this was a good chance to find out.

Anyway, I had managed to finish my work the night before, before going to bed at something like 2 am, but I still woke up at around 6 am today and managed to finish a blog post before I left for the railway station at 9:30 am. I had not taken a picture of the scanners at the entrance of every single local subway train station in China (in all cities, it seems, since both Guangzhou and Xiamen have something similar) yet, so here’s a picture I took.

I reached Guangzhou East Railway Station at some point around 10:30-10:45 am, and although there was a lot less security to walk through compared to the border station, there still was a large shopping mall to walk through to get to the railway station, and then two security posts to go through to the waiting room for my train — one backpack/item scanner to go through to get to the 1st floor restricted area, and an ID check to get through to Waiting Room 4 on the second floor, where my train (and some other trains, largely to Hong Kong) were going off from.

On the way there, I did two things. The first was to try to change my ticket, as Kel had said that I might be able to change my middle-seat ticket to an aisle-seat or window-seat one if there were any cancellations, as long as I did it more than 30 minutes before the train ride, so 11:25 am for my 11:55 am ride, as they stopped selling tickets (and changing seats) for trains 30 minutes before departure. However, by the time I found the ticket office and got in line for it, it was 11:10 am, and this was in front of me:

Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen, plus a rude couple cut in front of me since I was slightly off and behind to the side of that red-shirted girl in front of me. Whatever, I walked away and went back in through the item scanner gate (the office was actually outside a different gate with scanner than the one I had entered from, but there was no queue at the gate anyway). I then went to get lunch — or rather, I bought a rice bowl that I could eat on the train, just like my tradition of having an ekiben (train bento) on Japan’s shinkansen everytime I took it! Too bad about that first train ride from Hong Kong to Guangzhou breaking my perfect streak of bento lunches on long-distance trains, though that wasn’t a terribly long ride despite crossing a border.

Anyway, Waiting Room 4 was huge! It looked like this:

Once I got onto the train, there was a guy in the window seat on my right, while the seat to the left of me was empty so I half-scooted over to that seat. The owner of that seat came on on the second or third stop though, and both those guys proceeded to remain on the train for the rest of the train ride to Xiamen too. How dare they. The guy who came on later, and took the aisle seat, also had his table down the entire way JUST TO PUT HIS GLASSES ON IT WHILE HE TRIED TO NAP. Who does that? In an aisle seat? Fold it onto your stupid shirt and stop contributing to your rowmates’ claustrophobia.

Not that I have much claustrophobia, as long as I can take my shoes off, which I could and did. The seats were thin though, basically almost as thin as airplane seats, and much thinner than Japan shinkansen seats. There was only one power socket for the row, and it was between the middle seat and the window seat, so screw that guy in the aisle (but wait, I have an aisle seat on the way back.. though I think mine is in the side of the aisle with two seats instead of the one with three).

I had my lunch about two hours into the ride, which involved adding cold water (they were adamant to say, in both Chinese and English, that adding hot water was a bad idea) to immerse a chemical pack below the rice tray in the box, which then started producing heat and cooking the rice bowl that I put on top of it.

It turned out pretty nice, actually, and after I was done I got to annoy the guy taking up the aisle seat by leaving my own seat to throw the box away, and then taking my own sweet time using the bathroom and filling up my water and stretching my legs a little bit before returning to my seat again for the rest of the journey. There were some guys playing a card game at some other seats near the back of the carriage, and they had amassed a small collection of onlookers too despite the conductors or security guards walking back and forth in the carriage. It was sort of neat to witness that gathering.

Before and after lunch, I spent most of my time playing Hades 2 on the Steam Deck, commandeering the single power socket in our row for most of the trip. Near the end of the trip, the window guy asked to use it, so I relinquished it to him so that he could charge his phone.

Once we reached the station, I charged out and took a picture, my occasional “first scene I see in a new town” thing.

It was 4:30 pm, and I still needed to take the nearby subway and make a transfer to get to wherever my hotel was, so I continued upon my way. I learnt that the transit card that Kel had given me was a country-wide T-Union card that works in 336 cities or something, so it (and its remaining balance) just flawlessly worked here without me having to do anything extra with it, which was fantastic.

One easy transfer later, I reached my target station, Zhenhai Road, and then passed through a few vaguely interesting looking touristy places once I reached above ground:

I then reached a certain street that I can only think to describe it as being right out of Nier: Automata, I think I’m thinking of a specific part of the game where 2B visits the Copied City and sees avenues of white houses there.

Everything was so.. white and even. I believe the name of that road is Zhongshanlu, or Zhongshan Road (or Zhongshan Street, or even Zhongshanlu Street, but the lu part of the name already means road or street so let’s not do that. It’s like calling the Kamogawa in Kyoto the Kamogawa River, when the gawa part of the name already means river.)

I stopped off for dinner at a small restaurant near the start of the street, where a barker that was a little too friendly invited me into the shop and then tried to sell me as much as possible. I just wanted noodles though:

This was actually pretty good, but I couldn’t help but compare it to Singapore’s Fried Hokkien Mee since that the Chinese name of that dish is “Fujian Noodles” and, well, I was in Fujian Province now. That dish is to Fujian as the western Singapore Noodles dish is to SIngapore though — that is to say, it borrows the name but doesn’t actually exist as a dish in the borrowed name’s original location’s cuisine. But it at least looked somewhat similar, and it wasn’t too bad, so I devoured this Xiamen Fried Noodles just fine. They also gave me some Tofu Clam Soup but that was bad and tasteless, like tofu and clams in water. I do not recommend that one.

The barker tried to sell me some beer too, which I refused, and then told me to come back tonight and he’d show me some fun stuff or something like that too. I smiled politely and walked on.

Down the centre of Zhongshan Road was some sort of fair thing with official-looking stalls.. not really a night market, as basically all of them were actually closed at night and they seemed to sell souvenirs and weird things like wine and maybe insurance instead of meat on a stick and haphazardly-squeezed fruit juice. They were celebrating the 109th anniversary or something or other, which is a weird enough number that I’m sure they celebrate this every year. The stalls were up basically every day that I was here though, and I did not see a start or end date or anything of that sort at a cursory glance. There was also a good length of the street where new cars were just parked in the middle of the pedestrian-only road, forming a separator between the two sides of the road. It looked like some sort of car display, but again I did not have the context as to what that was. There were also plenty of benches strewn around and that was quite nice.

I soon reached my hotel, which was a little hotel located a couple streets off of this above road, but was still well within the touristy shopping district.