Sonia took me to Chongqing Bus station. We met her in the Youth Hostel and discovered that she was attending the medical university down the road from me in Fuzhou. She’s training to be a Nurse and she likes my cigarettes, they are roll ups, pretty much unheard of in these parts.  Very few women smoke in China, at least where I am, and I liked her all the more for that. She very efficiently got me there, neatly wrote down the phrase  * I’m going to Fuzhou* in Chinese script on a piece of paper and left me to it. I had an hour to wait, so found a vacant chair in the bus station which was not easy and settled down to wait. At 11.20am I went to find my bus and got on it.

I knew this type of bus existed but I’d never travelled on one. No seats, but you get a bed. A rather nice one too. I don’t know much about these things but it looked like polished teak with a stainless steel handrail to stop you falling out. A man came over, told me sternly to buckle myself in and take my shoes off. I did. Then the bus started up and we got going. I looked around at my fellow passengers, greeted them in Mandarin but got no response apart from vague glares. I offered biscuits. I’d stocked up with Oreos. Still no response. I said hello to a little boy. He screamed and hid behind his mother. What WAS going on ? I pondered this. At FJUT all the students are friendly. But they know I’m something to do with the university. Here I’m some crazy Westerner on THEIR damn bus. And I think I make sense in Mandarin but maybe they speak Min a local Fujian dialect. So I decided to make the best of it. I read, dozed and looked out of the window for several hours. I did mental calculations. 7 hours, nearly a third of the way there…….

And then the bus stopped. At what appeared to be a derelict building site. Inside was a meal laid out and a man with a megaphone encouraged us to tuck in. It was 30 ¥, a lot of money for a bad meal in China and obviously a scam but they do these scams better in Italy, in my experience. And then a slightly too genial Chinese man who wasn’t on the bus suggested I go up the stairs with him. Oh dear I thought. This is the mugging moment. There will be 3 Chinese guys up there who will relieve me of my wallet.  I thought carefully and still went up there. It wasn’t the mugging moment. It was the * I’m terribly sorry for the quality of the food downstairs. Would you like to try my excellent spicy fish hotpot moment*. ……

Yesterday I turned up at Fuzhou railway station for a trip to Chongquing and realised that I’d left my passport at home. Oh how stupid of me. For those of you not familiar with Chinese Law this was an utter disaster. As a foreigner you should keep your passport with you at all times and particularly when travelling. My travelling companions were Lemmie, who you will know as he is of this Parish, and Vanessa who will be blogging shortly. 

What to do ? Well my first reaction was to go home but Vanessa, through the sheer force of her personality got me a train ticket. I had a copy of my passport picture on my IPAD and the ticket assistant let me through after Vanessa had finished shouting at her and beguiling her in equal measures. So we got on the train to Chongqing. A great journey, lovely views and so on. The accommodation was nice in Chongqing, apart from the fire, but you can’t have everything, but still the fact that I had no passport worried me. The next day we went to The Chongqing  Museum of the Three Gorges. Fab but I knew I couldn’t go on to Xian. But how to tell the others ?

Tricky. I tried to tell Charlie, and Vanessa but I think that largely they thought I was mad. A couple of photocopies, get the passport couriered up. No problem !!  But then I heard that Chris, Vanessa’s friend had spoken up for me.  She said that if she was me she’d do the same thing. This got me thinking. I’ve read an awful lot of psychology, Behaviourism, Freudianism, Human-centred (how could it be anything else ? ) and so on. And A and B personalities. 

So I propose 2 new personality types. Let’s call the first one Charlie/Vanessa. These people don’t worry too much about anything. If it’s called a problem they see it as a challenge and they just know that everything will turn out fine in the end. Then there’s Chris/Mark. These people are well aware of Sod’s Law, that if anything can go wrong it will do !! And they are expecting the law to come into force at any moment. The CVs think the MCs are neurotic pessimists and the Mcs think the CVs are er… ridiculously optimistic. So I was determined to get back to FJUT to return to my passport. No trains available but there was a bus. 22 hours but that’s fine isn’t it ……….