Here I made the mistake of being the last person to disembark from my train carriage. As I came to the exit I saw a huge group of 20+ people waiting to get on. When I was on the last step of the train, a woman tried to wrestle my suitcase off me, I assume, so that it would allow her and the others to get onto the train, the sheer weight of my suitcase thankfully stopped her or I think I would have lost it in the crowd. As soon as I got onto the platform they started pushing against me in their rush to get onto the train. I was horribly sandwiched between them and the train conductor who was sandwiched between me and the train. I tried to move out of their way but there was no room for me to move into and they were pushing against me.
To make matters worse, the conductor started pushing me forward forcefully whilst shouting at me. At least I think he was shouting at me as I don't understand Mandarin. If it hadn't been for the crowd I'm sure I would have toppled over my suitcase, in any case my left leg was in agony. After what seemed like ten minutes though in reality it could be no more than a minute I came to the end of teather and turned around to the conductor and clearly without using swear word (I was impressed) expressed my displeasure. His face was a picture. It displayed complete shock and horror. I'm assuming until the point that I turned around, he assumed I was Chinese for after turning around he instantly he changed his demeanour. Instead of shoving and shouting at me. He started shouting at the crowd and using his hands to part the crowd to make way for me. Of course this had zero effect and I was left to walk sideways along the platform edge to get away from the crowd and carriage entrance.
This place is known to contain China's biggest community of Jews though if I'm honest I didn't come for that instead I planned to go and visit the Yellow River from a local viewing platform. I was also promised that the food was very good here.
In the end I spent less than 6 waking hours in this place due to a language barrier at the train station which meant I got a very slow fourteen hour day train to Shanghai as opposed to a fast night train. I was grateful for this as I had to get the lady behind the ticketing desk to ask the entire ticketing hall if anyone could speak English so that I could book this ticket. When I say I ask, what I mean is point to the relevant phrase in the back of my guide book. Luckily one gent came to my rescue and then disappeared as fast as he came so that I couldn't get the exact ticket I wanted. I'm not complaining though, I struggled to get past the word 'No' on my own.
The Yellow River viewing didn't happen, the great street vendor food did. This has been the hardest town I have visited to date. Practically no-one speaks English - that's not a complaint I like to think I'm not so British in this respect! I saw very few foreigners though I was told the week before there were huge numbers of us as there was a marathan on.
In the end the only things I saw of Kaifeng was the outside of a temple (it was closed by the time I got there) and the old city wall. Not much to write home about.
Currently in Datong killing time before my train to Pingyao.
