Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

As you may have guessed from the title, our return trip from Chengde to Beijing went quite a bit less smoothly than the rest of the weekend had. First of all, we had train tickets but no seats. Because in China, trains do "standing room only". And boy do they mean it.

The first hour or so of the trip wasn't too bad. We hung out in the really narrow aisles and played Uno, though we had to get up every few minutes for people to walk through. The aisles were so narrow that an airplane food cart wouldn't have fit through them.

The next leg of the trip, after a considerable amount of people had boarded, and not many had gotten off, was a little less comfortable. Comparatively, at least.

This is what the car looked like during the relatively empty times:

and this is what it looked like when we were not as lucky...