Not content with spending my first two days in Shanghai wandering aimlessly, I did the same today. With a few hours to murder before jumping on a train to Beijing, I swaggered off find something to eat. Of course, I did what I do best and got lost, heading down tiny, filthy alleyways while the locals looked at me as if I was green and had a three-foot dick hanging out of my cargo shorts and dragging in the dirt.
Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station is just a little bit bigger than Gosford Station. Like, instead of having three platforms it has about 45,000, and instead of having room for 17 people and one dog, it holds over 10,000 – and the place was bloody packed. To be honest, it was quite intimidating. Every sign was in Chinese, I was getting pushed this way and that by an endless swarm of Chinamen, and I was short on money for a ticket without a money swapper in sight. But I wasn’t in as much trouble as this bloke I met in the toilets.
They love those weird hole-in-the-ground squat toilets in China, and when I headed into the brasco there was this bloke who had his leg stuck in the hole. He was hootin’ and hollerin’, as you would if you were trapped in a toilet, and a horrible mess of sloppy shit was splashing around and soaking into his nice blue slacks. Then his poo-drenched shoe came unstuck, and old mate went face first into a huge puddle of piss on the floor, fresh from a thousand little yellow dicks.
Now, this isn’t the first time something like this would’ve happened. Chinese blokes would be falling into those stupid holes all the time and ending up splattered with arse chocolate, so why do they still use them when they know there’s better alternatives? It’s like seeing an Xbox 360 and saying, “Nup, I’ll stick with my Atari 2600 with the broken power cord and the cartridge slot that hasn’t worked since my weird uncle Dean shot a load of tadpole mayonnaise in there last Christmas.”
I finally got a ticket, waited three hours for the train, and settled in for the five hour ride. Traveling by train at over 300km/h really does give you a fantastic appreciation for this mind-blowing country. Shanghai stretched on forever, until finally the skycrapers gave way to farms. But massive cities – nameless to me, but home to thousands or millions of people – were constantly zooming past my window, part of a dirty urban sprawl that spreads for thousands of kilometres.
One weird thing is that, no matter the size of the town, city or village, every single building in that town, city or village is made to the same design, like the background of a dodgy cartoon. There’ll be dozens of 30 storey buildings, and every one of them identical. But the buildings in one town will be totally different to those in all the others, mental.
About halfway along the train stopped at some place or another, and the fattest Chinaman I’ve ever seen got on… and sat next to me. This fat, horrible waste of flesh must’ve been pushing 400kg, and his bulging gut hung out from beneath his snazzy blue t-shirt. He ate boiled eggs constantly, only stopping when he needed to fart. I named him Chunk. He was the most horrible bloke I’ve ever met, and it gets worse.
To take my mind off Chunk, I watched an episode of raunchy television program Californication on my computer. Of course it took about three seconds before Hank chucked it up some big-titted stonker, and when Chunk saw that he started bouncing around with his hands in the air and making a weird “woo woo woo” noise. And then he put his hand into his filthy pants and started wanking himself off, right there next to me. It sounds funny, but having a gigantic Oriental gentleman fondling his spring roll next to you is actually kinda scary.
With one final “Woo” that would make Ric Flair proud, Chunk blew his load in his pants, farted, and fell asleep. I was thinking that I’d never sleep again.
After finally arriving in Beijing, I took a cab to my hotel and was astonished to discover that my $30/night room was an absolute shit tip. There were actually footprints on the wall and what appeared to be blood stains on my bed. I doubt you could count the number of hookers who’d been killed there on two hands.
By that time it was late and I was tired, so I grabbed some KFC and went straight to bed with visions of wanking Chinamen dancing through my head. The exploration can’t wait till tomorrow – after the nightmares have stopped.
Originally written April 29, 2012 –
The Drunk and Jobless World Tour 