The next day, our last day in Chengdu, Zeneta and I walked to the Bui Hua Tan Park and the Green Ram Temple. We went there by way of Qing Tai Lu (Road). Qing Tai Lu is a conspicuous shopping street and seems a bit oddly located. I say oddly located because there is no real cluster of tourist activities immediately near it. Like most of the official Chinese shopping districts, the shops feature relatively high end, and very expensive, goods.
Qing Tai Lu ended near one of the many entrances to Bui Hua Tan Park. This park was made to resemble the park described in a famous, fictional, book, in China. It features a rock garden and several small resting pagodas.
From there we walked to the, Taoist, Green Ram Temple. I wanted to make sure that I showed Zeneta a typical temple on this trip because I was concerned that she would leave with a poor understanding of the temples in China. The only others that she had been to were the Shaolin temple and the one in Xinyang. The Shaolin temple was more of a tourist attraction than a working, and worshiping, temple. The one here in Xinyang was just plain weird, it is more of a house of horrors, that one would find at an amusement park, than a traditional temple.
We spent quite a bit of time walking and visiting, the various buildings in this temple. A lot of it was under maintenance, as this was clearly the off season.
We then returned to our hostel and waited to meet Helen in order to return to the train station. We had no trouble with the waiting room as Zeneta and I had soft sleeper tickets and we made it clear that Helen, who had a hard sleeper ticket, was with us.
After a very short wait we boarded. Zeneta ended up helping Helen with her ticket and finding her car. This was Helen's first time on a train in China and it eased things for her , a bit, by showing her and talking about the rules and practices, regarding tickets.
On this train they did ask to see our passports, this is something that surprised Zeneta as she had not been asked for her passport on previous train journeys. I was not as surprised because I have been asked for mine, in the past, and it is more common in Soft Sleeper. This is because Soft Sleeper is how foreigners are expected, and supposed, to travel. As a result, the system is in place to ask for the passports. In hard sleeper the system in place only asks for Chinese to produce documents; because, that is all they expect to have in hard sleepers. (before you say that this is imposing, try to get on an airplane without official ID)
I could see this as a problem for a Chinese-American traveling in China. Once the police in the train see us they, pretty much, leave us alone and tell us that they do not need our papers. I could foresee problems with a person who is not obviously non-Chinese, yet unable to produce an identity card and does not speak the language. We, as westerners, often do not have our passport on our person, I think it would be near foolish for a Chinese-American, traveling in China, to not have theirs on their person, or at least a copy of it, at all times.
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