We waste the morning in a search for the English Language Bookstore, which proves to be full of books written in Chinese. At lunch, we sit watching red-clad schoolchildren arriving for their afternoon classes. Shouting and laughing, they look the same as schoolkids in any other country, up to mischief and dragging their feet as they enter the school grounds.
A boy of about 12 or 13 comes around the corner. He is dressed in a man-sized black coat, blue trousers that are also the size of a man, and has a black hat perched at a jaunty angle upon his head. He is filthy dirty, and with the sleeves of his jacket hanging down over his hands and the cuffs of his pants dragging in the dust, he looks a sorry sight.
He sits down on a concrete edging outside the school gates and watches the children entering the playground. It is as if he is yearning to be allowed in too, and this forlorn figure is a sad reminder of the gap between the haves and the have-nots, even in a supposedly classless and egalitarian society such as China’s. I’m not usually given to feeling sorry for the poor, but this little figure in his black hat and baggy clothes makes me wish I could do something for him, but what?
We fritter away the afternoon in an offhand way, then at 5pm catch a Number 5 bus down to the railway station. In the vast waiting room, we wait until 7pm when we board train number 321 which leaves for Jinjiang at 7.15pm.
CurseOfTheTraveller 