The train ride was uneventful and about 3 hours. We watched as the metropolitan Beijing center gave way to industrial sprawl and then gradually became cultivated fields, edged by tall feathery trees and cut in half by the occasional road or dirt lane. Hard to tell what was growing, especially for my (very) ignorant eyes, but it did look like a mix of current crops and fields that were being cleared and were brown and waiting. It was so smoggy exiting Beijing that we couldn't see the mountains or even, sometimes, the buildings and fences right beside the train, but once we could see the land was just flat, pancake flat. I don't know if it's always been like that geographically, or if thousands of years of being farmed for crops that need flat land have changed the face of the landscape.
We rolled into Zhengzhou East station -- huge and cavernous and hangar-like, with an unclear distinction between indoors and outdoors (there are no real doors, so in a way the station is just an anonymous metal and concrete canopy), and registered the woodsmoke smell to the air that I always associate with Zhengzhou. We met our guide, Rita, whom I remembered from our 2010 visit here, and were whisked onto a bus and off to the bank, where we transformed large amounts of crisp $100 bills into stacks of multi-colored RMB. Oh, and one rather wrinkled $5 bill was transformed as well - Charlie brought $31 from his bank on this trip and had been kind of obsessively focused on converting it to yuen. I finally switched some of mine with him (and gave him a very favorable exchange rate, I might add), but he had held one $5 bill back. I think it was weighing on him because when Rita stopped at the bank and invited one person from each group to come inside to change money, Charlie shot out of the bus behind us clutching his change purse.
Another thing that I found fascinating and a little eerie inside the bank was a little boy, waiting for his dad, who looked startlingly like Charlie. You might think, well, shocker, you're in China, there will be people who look like Charlie, but the fact is that I rarely see people and kids with his specific characteristics and Chinese people sometimes ask me where he's from and puzzle over it a bit. But this boy - wow. I surreptitiously took some pictures of him for further comparison later, and asked Rita if she noticed it too, and she did! So -- Charlie's doppelgänger. Yet to know which one is the EVIL twin. :-)
Then we checked into our hotel and I was a nuisance, because on measuring off our first room and another I found it was nearly 2 feet narrower. That's a significant loss of floor space when 4 people will be sharing one room for nearly a week. So we moved. Future visitors to the Zhengzhou Hilton, please take note : the corner rooms are the ones that are narrower. Rita says guests have raised this question before but the staff says that all the rooms are supposed to be the same width.
We then marched off to Walmart to lay in supplies and be gawking foreigners who take pictures of chicken feet and so on. To be fair, we get gawked at a fair amount too.
Then we came back to our room and unpacked and chilled out for a bit. We set out late for a ramen dinner at Ajisen Ramen across the street, where I made a classic mistake -- we got our ramen through gesturing, then I caught the eye of our server once it had arrived and pointed to a picture in the menu where the ramen had lots of green veggies piled on top, hoping to get something vaguely healthy added to the mix. 3 minutes later they deliver ... A 3rd bowl of ramen. Oops. Still no veggies.
We came back to the room, took some BLISSFUL showers, got into PJs and snuggled up for some movie watching. And everyone was asleep by 9 (which turned out to be a bad idea because my brain then decided that 7 hours was all I needed and I woke up for good at 4. Yikes. Fortunately the fitness center is open 24 hours and you can hand wash a lot of laundry by the glow of the bathroom's nightlight.)
We had a diabolical little adventure in the night. About an hour after we fell asleep, the TV turned itself on to the Hilton welcome screen, which has a message for me welcoming me to the Hilton, and plays music very loudly. I jolted half-awake in an outraged panic and said a lot of swear words, making it especially lucky that Charlie sleeps like a log that has taken Ambien. Tim staggered over and did -- something -- and we were back to blessed silence and darkness. Until it happened again, maybe an hour or two later. That time Tim pulled the cord out of the back of the cable box, and turned the TV off again. That wasn't enough, though, and the TV turned itself back on and just blazed staticky grey light into the room. By then it seemed positively malevolent and i was groping around for the remote angrily trying to find something to do. I felt meanly satisfied when Tim flipped it up and pulled the power plug right out of the back. Take THAT you wretched thing! And then back to sleep.
Actually we've been lucky when it comes to sleep, settling almost immediately into a China schedule with none of that "I want to die" jet lag feeling. I can sometimes feel it around the edges mid-to-late afternoon but mostly we have been peachy!
And Charlie continues to be a champ. He has had one or two low points, by which I mean he complained and grumped and groaned for 15-20 minutes -- but each time (I realized afterward) he's been starving. Rookie mom move on my part.
Today is when we meet -- or reconnect with -- our little guy and I have no idea how it will go. I hope he's as happy to see us as we are to see him but who knows? And who knows how Charlie will deal with this projected plan becoming a flesh-and-blood reality?
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