Adventures in a Chinese train

It was our first week in China. After spending 4 days in Beijing me and my friend and I were planning to head to Xi'an, to visit the Terracotta Warriors. While in Beijing, I met my old friend Sammy. We used to share an apartment in Dublin and it was great to see her again. She helped us to buy our train tickets to Xi'an. She told us that we would have to pay an additional fee and change to a different bed. as for different For various reasons there were not available tickets for the same bed for the whole trip. It sounded a bit weird but we trusted her and she even wrote a short explanation of the situation in Chinese in on a piece of paper so that we could show it to the train supervisor.

We got to the train and went to our assigned beds. It was going to be a long trip. 10 hours! After 3 hours of sleeping, the supervisor came to wake us up.
We showed him the note with the explanation in Chinese and he started to speak really loud and telling told us something that sounded like NO. He couldn't speak a word of English and we couldn't speak a word of Chinese. After half an hour trying to understand each other he sent us to the other end of the train.

I opened the door to get to into the wagon next car and what I saw was a bit shocking. The train was extremely crowded, people were eating, screaming, and watching movies. Children were running around. There was no space at all for bags. There was no door in the toilet and the smell was awful. Also, people were allowed to smoke.
We tried to find a seat knowing that it was going to be a long night...We were a bit nervous as everybody was staring at us. There were no tourists what so ever whatsoever in that part of the train. The worst part was that we didn't have a seat number assigned, so we had to change seats all the time as new people was were coming into the train and already had their seats reserved.

Eventually, people turned out to be very helpful with to us. They tried to move around so that me and my friend and I could sit together. After midnight more or less, not many people was were boarding the train so we could finally sit and try to sleep. People tried to speak English with us even if it was just one or two words. They were curious about where we were going.

It was a long night indeed but a very interesting experience. If I look back I'm glad we ended up in that train!