Living on a Chinese hard-seat train

There are classes on Chinese trains:

Soft sleeper: bunk beds that have enough space for you to sit up in, with sliding doors to shut the compartment, which is shared by only 4 people.

Hard sleeper: bunk beds that are crammed close together, so you cannot sit up straight in them, with little privacy.

Soft seat: seats with a bit of leg room and a table in front of you.

Hard seat: seats (still padded) that do not recline at all, crammed together with a whole bunch of different people, babies crying, people talking loudly and walking around, people pushing carts through, yelling as they try sell you things, annoying music playing (and an English voice that intermittently says, "Here is some pleasant music to help you have a relax and chill morning"), squatty potties that empty onto the tracks and are absolutely disgusting (which makes sense since people are trying to squat as the train rocks back and forth), people staring openly at you (probably wondering why the rich foreigners couldn't afford better seats), and no heat as the night outside gets close to freezing and the air rushes in through cracks around the windows.
And yet... people are very interesting. It is very interesting to try carry on a conversation in Chinese (because nobody speaks English), to watch people with all manner of sacks and boxes of things headed back to their villages from the big city, to observe families interacting with each other, to share food (sold by vendors at the railway stations) with your seatmates as you grin and nod because you can't communicate in words, and to figure out how to sleep on a straight up-and-down seat by observing people who have probably done it a hundred times.

My advice: the hard seat is great! It is very interesting and it is amazing what you can handle (even when you are a soft westerner). And it cost us the equivalent of about 25 Canadian dollars. However, if the ride is 13 hours through the night, it might not be the most comfortable. I'd say it's an experience that's great to have once in my life! :)

However, when we arrived in Xi'an, we somehow missed the pick-up service from our hostel, and ended up waiting in the cold for a few hours, being buffeted by huge crowds of people, hungry, tired, and freezing, constantly being harassed by people asking for money or trying to sell us things. And my backpack broke. We were not incredibly thrilled.

We got to the hostel, however (took a bike taxi and then ended up walking pretty far still), and had really long hot showers that were AMAZING and a great little breakfast (complete with free coffee!). We laughed really hard about our ridiculous morning once we felt human again. Today we wandered around the walled city centre of Xi'an, through the Muslim quarter (and a very lively and completely packed street market, which was a very cool experience!). It was quite a different experience from any we've had so far in China! We're looking forward to seeing the Terracotta Warriors and some Emporer's tomb tomorrow, and then biking around the wall of the city the day after before we leave Xi'an for Guilin.