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It was a long morning with a bad factory, but fancy tea provided.

(Left to right: Joe, their engineer, me, Bing, US rep, two guys to make sure I was happy with the idea they had run off with 1 million of my companies money.)

As I sat at the restaurant with the owners of the company I was visiting in China and their “friends” a waiter came in carrying a bag. In the bag was a snake.
“Does this snake meet your satisfaction?” Joe asked me.
I looked at the snake in the bag. I had eaten snake before, but not in a very long time. And, that was canned snake that was pre-cooked.
“Looks fine to me,” I said.
Lunch was always a big deal when I was there. I was, after all, the representative of a customer spending millions of dollars. While they seemed outright distressed I wouldn’t drink alcohol or smoke, they made the best of it. Toasts were made, with me drinking soda, and everyone looked happy. (Apparently the tea is not considered acceptable for toasts. Once they started, I wasn’t given any more.)
The waiter came back and put down two very small glasses in front of me. One had a clear liquid, one had a red liquid.
“What are these?” I asked.
“The venom and blood of the snake,” Joe told me.
“What am I supposed to do with them?” I asked.
“You drink them!” he said.
“No thank you,” I said. “I’ve got some soda here.”
They were on the rotating table in front of me, so I turned it around to face him.
“Why don’t you drink them?” I asked.
“It is a great honor to drink them,” he said, turning the table back to me. “I give our customer this honor.”
“The honor is all yours,” I said, rotating it so they were in front of him again.
“You should drink them,” he said, turning them to me again. “They will increase your vision.”
“I see just fine,” I said, turning them back again. “By all means, improve your vision.”
“I insist,” he said, and started them back around.
“I also insist,” I said, putting my hand on the table so it stopped rotating in front of their engineer.
He looked at his boss. He looked at me.
He drank both.
Joe glowered a bit. I shrugged and raised my soda.
The waiter brought in barbecued snake.
It was too dry and very spicy.

When we finished the meal, Joe explained to me that driving 4 hours each way was too much for him to bring me back to Shanghai that night. So, he had bought me a first class train ticket back to Shanghai. They would drive me to the train station and I could get on the train there.
The US rep handed me a ticket with nothing on it I could read.
We set off for the train station.

I got out of the car. The US rep said “the first class entrance is on the right”. I turned to look and they drove away quite quickly.
The guide books were clear that there is a different kind of train ticket for Chinese citizens and visitors. You can apparently get in trouble if you have the wrong kind. I had no idea which kind I had.
I walked towards the first class entrance.
The young woman in the army uniform with the machine gun made it plain she wanted to see my ticket.
She made it equally clear I did not have the correct kind of ticket to go in that entrance.
No Chinese was required for that. The machine gun motioning towards me was enough.
I went over to the main entrance.
It is all one big room inside. Very big. Full of people.
It was pretty clear to me that I was the only foreigner there, and something out of the ordinary.
It was like watching people do the wave. Everywhere I looked people were looking somewhere else. But, out of the corners of my eye, I was the center of attention.
I can’t read Chinese. But, I can match shapes. I matched the shapes on my ticket with the shapes on the signs and went over to a door with the same symbols.
There were lots of people on benches waiting.
I sat down next to a man with two kids. They hadn’t learned the trick of turning away when I looked at them and stared at me full on. I smiled.

I took out the postcards the little old woman in Shanghai had forced me to buy to cross the pedestrian bridge and began filling them out.
“Shanghai?” the man next to me asked.
“Yes,” I said with my very limited vocabulary of Chinese. “Where is Shanghai.”
He continued to talk in Chinese, pointing at the postcards and himself and the entrance we were sitting near.
I took that to mean he was going there too and I was in the right place.
I thanked him.
A while later an announcement was made in Chinese. Everyone stood up. A short time later another one was made, and everyone sat down.
“The train is late?” I asked in English.
He said something in Chinese with a clear shrug of “what can you do?”
I sat down too.
Eventually they made another announcement and everyone got up again. This time they let us out over a bridge to a train platform.
People got in lines. I got in a line.
“Wrong line,” a young man said to me in English. “You must match number.”
He showed me his ticket and pointed at the ground.
I had not realized the lines were numbered. I had number 7 and was in line 3.
“This way,” the young man said. He led me over to line 7, losing his place in 3.
The train with a big Mao pulled into the station and everyone got on.

The train was VERY crowded. There were two levels, but I couldn’t even get to the stairs, much less up there.
The doors closed and we set off. The folks on the train seemed less worried about looking at me. But in that crowd, they didn’t have much choice.

As we pulled out of the station, someone was fighting their way through the crowd. The ripple in the crowd made its way over to me. It was the man who had sat next to me in the station. His kids were not with him.
He came up to me.
“Very good,” he said in Chinese and shook my hand.
I realized he had left his kids somewhere else in the train to come and make sure I had gotten on and was in the right car.
“Thank you,” I said in Chinese.
He shook my hand again and then pushed his way through the crowd back the way he had come from.

We went for a while and we stopped.
I had no idea where we were.
“Shanghai?” I asked the crowd.
“Not Shanghai,” a young man near me said.
This continued for several more stops. We’d stop, I’d ask, he’d say no.
It got to the point where he’d just start telling me no as we pulled into a station.

Gradually the train got less crowded. Eventually I could sit on the stairs.
As I did, an older Chinese woman came down the stairs. When she got to about my level I stood up to let her past. We looked eye to eye. She looked down at her feet three steps above where my feet were and gave a gasp.
She hurried past me and disappeared.

Eventually there were only a dozen or so of us in the car. One of whom was the “not Shanghai” guy.
Then, we pulled into a station and he turned to me.
“Shanghai!” he shouted and pointed to the door.
“Thank you,” I said in Chinese and we both stepped out into the city.

I had enough to public transportation and took a cab back to my hotel.
The elevator up to the 46th floor where my room waited seemed like a very long ride.

That ended the week I spend in Shanghai on my first trip to China. The next day I flew off to Hong Kong to terrorize aluminum companies.
Their tea was not as good as in Shanghai.