The imbecility of my prior actions began to set in as I accepted that I had in fact missed the train and this was not some horrible hangover induced hallucination. The hangover itself was kicking into full gear and I hadn’t had the masochistic pleasure of one like this for a long time. The only thing I could think about doing was somehow getting to the next station so I could jump on the train with my friend. There was no way I was going to abandon the journey we had planned because that would make me quite the ass goblin. Him having to take on the full costs of everything instead of splitting it simply wouldn’t be just.

I talked to my friend and tried to figure out what the next station was, for a brief moment I was actually exploring the possibility of jumping in a taxi and getting on the train at the next station stop. This idea quickly shriveled up and croaked when I found out that the next station was a good two hours away, probably more with all the goats and giant abyss-like-holes crowding the country roads. So I asked one of the security people what my options were and they said that the best thing to do would be to change my ticket for the next available train. With what little computational power I had left in my brain at this time, I decided it seemed like a satisfactory idea.

The next 30 minutes were the most horrible of the whole trip. I was waiting in this line for the ticket booth that seemed as if I was actually getting farther away from the window. I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the case what with the infamous queue jumpers partaking in my misery. My entire body felt as if it was stuck under a steamroller and the rolling apparatus was just about to crush my skull. Halfway into the line there were these railings to prevent line snakes and my lifeless corpse was dangling over it them whole time. There was an old guy behind me who literally pushed me forward every time the line moved up.

I got to the window and what was supposed to be changing my ticket, was actually buying a new ticket. At triple the cost of the old. Someone up above was finally giving me some slack however, because the ticket person informed me that I could grab an express train leaving at 10:45am. The amusing part was that I was actually going to get there only 10 minutes after my friend as he was on the snail train. So I grabbed this ticket for 160rmb (my original ticket was only 56rmb) and proceeded to take something like a nap involving loud overhead announcements and people barking into their cellphones until boarding time. After boarding I once more proceeded to nap off my pain until débarquement. In the few moments that I was awake on the express train, I discovered that China does have a countryside, and that the new trains go hella fast (225KM/h for you spec geeks).

I met my friend in Tai’An (泰安), a tiny hamlet of about 500,000. According to him, his train sucked because there were people sitting next to him in the aisles, and next to those people, there were kids pooping in the aisles. I know this isn’t true because he tends to downplay things, so it was likely the people sitting next to him were in fact the ones doing the pooping and the little kids were probably smoking meth and torturing their stuffed animals. In the ten minutes he had been there he found a hotel charging a larcenous price of $14 a night so I suggested we could do better. After a brief walk around the block we were booked into a dingy room (they’re all dingy rooms in touristy places like this, they save the good hotels for places where no would ever want to go to like Beijing) for $10 a night.

We went to lunch at a Chinese fast food place not so great but not so shabby either, then we spent the day burning off what little energy I had left combing each individual avenue and street to get a feel for the place. The consensus? Graveyards in the middle of a desert on an abandoned island in OUTERSPACE had more life than this place. Satisfied that the town offered nothing other than its famed mountain, we retired for the night after a hot pot dinner that turned out to be less lethal (some could say, tazer-like) than most hot pots I’ve had.

That night I was raped HARD…by mosquitoes. I have a serious problem with them. First they love my blood. I am glad vampires don’t really exist and I don’t live in a place with vampire bats, because surely those suckers would be knockin’ on my door…with battering rams. Normally I can deal with them. Here in Asia, and this is all over Asia, the little succubi bite me, then the bite swells to the size of a tennis ball. I am not over-exaggerating as one would tend to do in such situations to arouse pity. But it’s HORRIFYING I tell ya! They transform me into a hideous deformity, so freakish even Barnum brothers would say ”OMGWTF?!”. So I got worked by these little pricks that night and of course they got the only part of me that wasn’t covered…my face. I woke up in the middle of their orgy screaming “NO, NOT THE FACE!!!, NOT THE FAAAAAAAAACE!!!!”. My friend must of thought I was just having one of those totally common for people my age boxtox nightmares because he just kept dozing. It was true, after examining my face they had bit me badly. So I folded myself into a position even a master yogi would be proud of that cocooned my entire body in covers and had a horrible sleep, dreading having to show my mangled money maker in the morning.

I know it isn’t as much of a cliffhanger as last time, but hey…I’m lazy and I need a break from writing this junk…so…IS THIS THE END??? Will I be able to show myself to the world? Will I have the confidence to make the mountain climb…of the MILLENIA?! If hippies, hipsters and hiphop merged would the world collapse at the hands of an unholy trinity of stylistic MALCONTENTS?!?! Find out next time!!!

Filed under: tourist shit