Up at 7 AM. Our last day with our companions (Jia Ming, Leon, and their non-English speaking friend). We spent it with them eating ramen and seeing a little more of Fenghuang, culminating in a tour of the city walls. We then had some boba (Li is such a doubter!) and slowly made our way back to the hostel. A quick taxi ride later and we were on the way to Changsha via bus. Read a lot of “Life of Pi” but not a lot of other exciting things happened on the trip. With 5 hours to kill in Changsha, we first ate at Chairman Mao’s restaurant and spiced up the place. Within 5 minutes of our arrival, 5 other tables were full of customers, although the place was still relatively empty. A quick walk with our bags later and we were at a sketchy Internet cafe that used fake Chinese IDs instead of our IDs to register our presence. Spent some time looking up Hong Kong tariffs and cameras and netbooks. Now we’re on the train with two rambunctious girls and top bunks in a 6-bed car. Remember to always upgrade to soft sleeper if you have to take a Chinese train, the difference in price is NOT WORTH IT! Luckily, there are two English-speaking students here to keep us company. One of them is a student (soon-to-be senior) at Milton Academy in Boston and the other wants to study architecture in Shenzhen before doing a course at Concordia University, in Quebec, Canada. I talked to the former student (who has a California valley accent, strangely) a bit about Yale which is his dream school. There is no shower and only a squat toilet aboard the train (that empties directly out onto the rails, so they’re closed while you’re at a station). At this point my stomach hurt a lot so I got to spend most of the night awake and cramped in my bunk with my feet hanging over the edge. The little girls were really cute though - I don’t think they were sisters because one lives in Taiwan and the other lives in Hong Kong - but they slept on the same bunk holding each other.