Do you know anyone who’s studying Chinese? We don’t. But everyone here in China is learning English. I mean everyone.

As we were walking through the Panda park this morning we passed this group of kids and their teachers. The little boys all shouted, “Hello!”

I turned to them and responded, stuck my hand out and said, “Shake hands.” The first little boy pulled away, but another kid in the second row pushed through and stuck his hand out. That was all the rest of them needed. They all crowded around and wanted to shake hands.

The teacher thanked us and said the whole class has learned how to say hello, good morning, and how are you in English.

Damn, those kids were cute.

Despite the fact that we have a very good friend who’s Buddhist, I know next to nothing about the religion. So forgive me if I mangle a few facts here, Richie.

Jamie and I frittered away some time in an airport coffee shop while waiting for our flight from Xi’ An to Chengdu. The two guys at the next table were Buddhist monks.

When we finally moseyed out to our gate there were two open seats next to the the monks. I said, “Let’s go sit next to them, Jamie. This should be interesting.” She, of course, thought I was insane. Especially when I insisted that she take the seat next to them.

We hadn’t been seated for more than a minute when the older one reached across the younger one and tapped her on the leg. Note that he tapped her on the leg, not the arm and not the shoulder.

They spoke not a word of English and we spoke not a word of Chinese, but that didn’t stop us from trying to communicate.

The way we understand the story, the older one is a very prominent monk. He’s written books and he does a lot of public speaking. We know this because he pulled out his iPhone and began scrolling through photos of himself speaking and pointing to himself and miming writing when he got to the photo of his book.

Far as we could tell they had just been at some sort of Buddhist convocation and were on their way home to their monastery here in Chengdu. It might have been that the younger monk was some sort of pledge who got hazed at the convocation. (Wait. Am I confusing entering the priesthood with joining a fraternity?)

They were quite smitten with Jamie. The younger one wanted her email address. They were very happy to have their photo taken with her.

But then, who wouldn’t be?

Remember the movie Blade Runner, one of Harrison Ford’s first big hits? It was a 1984 science fiction thriller that took place in Los Angeles in the year 2019. It presented a dark, disturbing, dystopian picture of the future.

Well, you don’t have to wait until 2019 to see if Blade Runner comes true. We’ve seen that dark, disturbing, dystopian future and it’s right here in Xi’ An, China.

We had never heard of Xi’ An until we began planning this trip. We both wanted to see the terra cotta soldiers and it turns out they’re located in Xi’ An, which is a two hour plane trip from Beijing.

Since we’d never heard of Xi’ An, we assumed it was some quaint little country town that just happened to be home to these remarkable relics. Boy, we’re we wrong. It turns out that the population of Xi’ An is somewhere between 8 million and 13 million, depending on who you ask.

The streets are as tangled as a can of spaghetti. The traffic is chaotic. The neon is garish. The heat and humidity is oppressive. The smog’s so thick you can’t see down to the end of the block. And the poverty is overwhelming.

I’ve stayed at a lot of very nice hotels during my career and the Xi’An Hilton is equal to any of them. But our taxi driver took us through the bowels of the city to reach the hotel and Jamie and I were in the back seat wondering into what hell we had descended.

He finally turned a corner and this oasis jumped out at us. We walked into the hotel dumbfounded that this gorgeous hotel was sitting in the middle of this squalor. After checking in we walked out to the markets across the street. It was eight o’clock at night and the heat and humidity were still overwhelming.

I think we made it a block before Jamie said, “Let’s go back to the hotel.” I didn’t argue.

The photo accompanying this story looks far better than the reality. This is a restaurant and the menu sits out in front. I have no idea how long those cooked crayfish had been sitting out in the heat and I have no idea what the live, wiggling things were nor how long they could continue wiggling in the heat. And neither of us really wanted to find out.

Xi’ An. The only thing missing is Harrison Ford.

Today we roamed through one of those crazy, noisy Chinese alleyway bazaars that you see in the movies.

I almost got up the nerve to try fried beetles, but just about gagged at the thought of eating the starfish on a stick. And yet, somehow, that sound delish compared to the living, wiggling scorpions on a stick.

What is wrong with these people?

The Beijing Marriott Great Wall is a great, great hotel. The level of service is absolutely amazing. And on top of that, they provide invaluable information at breakfast.

There’s something very strange going on here in Beijing. People stare at Jamie like she’s from another planet. It really is quite bizarre.

Check out the photo above: Jamie was doing a silly pose in the Forbidden City when the young Chinese woman and her mother (just to the left of Jamie in the photo) approached us and asked if I would take a photo of the three of them together. They were giddy — almost beyond words — when she agreed to do it.

Today was the weirdest of all. People were taking photos and videos of her all day. We were resting our feet at a sidewalk cafe when I noticed a young couple snapping one photo of her after another. I said, “Hey, Jamie, wave at them.” She did. They took the photo of her waving, broke into huge smiles and the young woman started jumping up and down and clapping her hands with excitement.

Another young woman told Jamie that people stare because she has “a tall nose and big eyes.” We assume she meant that as a compliment.

We have another theory.

Mandarin Gourmet, out on Los Osos Valley Road, is our favorite Chinese restaurant in San Luis Obispo. Our favorite waitress, a young Chinese immigrant, once told us that Jamie looks exactly like a famous Chinese actress, which seemed very odd because there are no Asians swimming in Jamie’s gene pool.

But who knows? The Chinese also eat live worms and scorpions, so one never knows why they do the things they do.

Yeah, we’re sometimes morons.

When we arrived at the Beijing train station at 5:45 a.m. it was already packed full of thousands of Chinese, all screaming into their cell phones. It was cacophony on steroids.

We worked our way through the crowd to the taxi queue. I had the name and address of the hotel written down on a piece of paper and showed it to about 20 different taxi drivers. Some of them claimed they didn’t speak English, others rudely waved us away. We were getting very frustrated and couldn’t figure out why none of them would give us a ride.

One driver finally indicated that he would take us to our hotel, the Marriott Great Wall Beijing, and motioned for us to put our bags in his trunk.

We climbed into the back seat of the cab. He turned on the meter, we left the station, drove about 100 yards and pulled into a driveway. The driver indicated that we had arrived at our destination.

Holy crap. We had no idea that our hotel was so close to the train station. The ride was so short that the fare hadn’t even risen from the minimum 13 yuans.

I asked the driver what the fare was. He said, “Twenty.” I gratefully handed him 50 yuan note (about $8) and went into the hotel.

No wonder an entire fleet of taxis turned us down. There’s nothing a taxi driver hates more than waiting in a long queue and then getting a short fare. And it would be tough to find a shorter fare than ours.

Good lord, man, Charles Manson’s family took better-looking mugshots. Believe it or not, we felt even worse than we looked. If that’s possible.

We walked into the Beijing Marriott at 6:00 in the morning and tried to check in. This is, of course, far earlier than rational guests check out of hotels, so no rooms were available.

The director of guest relations walked over and introduced himself. He may have taken one look at us from across the lobby and decided that he needed to intervene because there were some very smelly homeless people in his hotel.

Everything changed when he found out we had taken the train from Moscow. He showed us to some seats in the lounge, brought us coffee and tea, asked if there was anything else he could do for us, and said they would get a room ready for us as soon as one was available.

While we were sitting in the lounge catching up on a week’s worth of email, the manager of the hotel came over, introduced himself and asked somewhat incredulously, “Did you really take the train all the way from Moscow?”

By 9 a.m. they had a room ready. We went upstairs and took our first showers in a week. They were long and they were hot because getting all the dirt off took some concentrated scrubbing. I shaved. My god, we felt human again. Then we went back downstairs to have our first real meal in a week.

As we walked through the lobby, the hotel manager spotted us, walked over to greet us with a big smile on his face and said, “You both look a lot better … not that you looked bad. That’s not what I’m saying.”

Yes, it was. That’s exactly what he was saying. And we completely understood.

Let me say it again: The train trip across Siberia was a once in a lifetime experience.

And now that we’ve done it once, we never have to do it again.

We’re back on board the train after our four-hour break in Zabaykalsk during which work crews changed the wheels on the train so that they’ll work on China’s narrower gauge railroad.

As we boarded, Rustam said that customs and immigration control would now take another three hours to check everyone on the train.

First a tough-looking hombre with a drug-sniffing dog came through the train. While the uniformed agent stood outside our door, his dog ran into our car, sniffed around quickly, found nothing and automatically ran to the next compartment to repeat the process. The agent said not a word, but gave us a look that said, This is a great job. The dog does all the work and I get to stand here scaring the hell out of weak kneed Americanski tourists. How the hell did these clowns win the Cold War?

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look he gave us.

Then a very attractive, but severe young woman in a sleek, formfitting uniform came to our door and demanded our passports. Think Lilith on the old Frasier TV show. She was all business. She asked for Jamie’s passport first, ordered her to stand up, looked over the documents very carefully, then turned to the photo page. She stared at Jamie, then stared just as carefully at the passport photo and repeated the process three or four more times. I’m pretty sure she was thinking, What happened? This woman has cute hair in her passport photo, but now she looks like she washed it with some crazy waterless shampoo.

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look she gave her.

She finally slipped Jamie’s passport into her briefcase and turned to me. Same process, but I swear she took twice as long looking back and forth between me and my passport. Then she gave me a look that said, If it weren’t for this chick with the strange dirty hair, I could get myself some of this hunky Americanski dude.

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look she gave me.

Then she put my passport in her briefcase and left. Brokenhearted, I’m sure.

A quarter hour or so later a much older, even more severe uniformed man stood in our doorway and started demanding answers in a very heavy Russian accent.

“How much Chinese and Russian money do you have?”

Hell, man, I thought he wanted an exact count, so I pulled out my wallet and started counting out my 2400 rubles. Please keep in mind that 2400 rubles is no laughing matter. It’s almost eighty American dollars and the thought entered my mind that I might have been in violation of some arcane Russian currency law by carrying around a wad of cash that size.

He gave me a look that said, You freakin’ moron. I’m looking for Russian drug lords carrying billions of ill-gotten euros and you’re showing me your pathetic eighty dollars? Sit down, you Americanski idiot.

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look he gave me.

Another quarter hour or so passed and another very large, very tough-looking uniformed man came to our compartment and ordered us out so that he could go over it with a fine tooth comb.

He gave Jamie a look that said, Honey, I may be going over this compartment with a fine tooth comb, but from the looks of your hair it could really use a fine tooth comb. Or a comb of any kind. Do yourself a real favor and wash that mop with real shampoo as soon as you get to Beijing.

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look he gave her.

Another hour or so passed and the sexy little passport chick who was so hot for me came back. She looked at Jamie, opened her passport and said in the cutest little Russian accent, “Jamie Leen deYonk?”

Jamie said, “Yes” and her passport was immediately handed back to her.

Then she looked at me and with an undeniable sexual tension thick in the air she stumbled as she tried to say my name, “Jamesie Leen … Jamesie Lee deYonk?”

I said, “Yes” and my passport was handed back to me along with a tiny slip of paper on which she had written, “Lose the chick with the dirty hair and meet me in the cabooski.”

OK, there was no note, but I consider that a mere technicality. Jamie may disagree, but I think that’s what a note would have said if the agent hadn’t feared running afoul of her superiors at the KGB.

Another hour has passed and we’re still sitting here. No sign of any progress.

UPDATE: We’re finally pulling out of the Zabaykalsk train station seven hours and forty-five minutes after we arrived.

Dos vadanya, my sweet little passport chick, until we meet again.

We were told that some first class cars have one shower per car and that others have one shower shared between two compartments. That’s not exactly the standard we’re used to, but we keep telling each other that this is an adventure, damn it, an adventure.

Turns out there’s no shower and just two very small bathrooms to be shared by all ten luxurious first class cabins and all 20 first class passengers in our car.

Each bathroom has a toilet, a very tiny sink, and a strange contraption that’s supposed to function as a faucet. Water comes out of it, but only in a manner of speaking.

Whatever you do, however, do not drink that water. There’s a sign above the faucet that makes it very clear that this water is not to be consumed.

So one could argue, if one had a very positive outlook on life, that this train really isn’t much different than our accommodations at the Renaissance Hotel in St Petersburg where they also warned us not to drink the water.

Jamie was smart enough to foresee this possibility and she stocked up on baby wipes before we left. So while all the other genteel, worldly sophisticates in the other luxurious first class compartments are stinking to high heaven, we’re as clean as can be.

(I think I could solve our temporary financial problems by selling the baby wipes to all the other passengers, but Jamie would rather be clean than eat.)

UPDATE: Denise and Lars also brought along baby wipes, so we’re happy to report that our friends also smell delightful.

UPDATE #2: Jamie wants to send thanks out to our friend Traci Wilson who gave us a small bottle of waterless shampoo. I haven’t tried it because Jamie’s hair doesn’t look any cleaner to me.

UPDATE #3: Note to our friend Diane Fleming: Despite using that waterless shampoo, Jamie has not received a single compliment on her hair aboard the Trans-Siberian Express.