I just studied a leg amputation procedure, but...

I just studied a leg amputation procedure, but the catch is that it was entirely in Chinese. That took some time to interpret. Now I have a quiet moment where I would like to relay last weekend's trip into words.
The crowds in Xitang's old town died out by Monday morning. Shawna and I spent our last night in a pricey inn that provided us with a balcony right beside the canal. The canal, though pretty in its own right and romantically lit with lanterns by night, was quite foul. The same water that people used to wash their faces and clothes was the same water used to dip dirty mops, rinse food, gut chickens, and urinate. Very vividly I recall a boy peeing into the canal while less than 15 ft downstream a restaurant worker was washing snow peas. In all though, the place was fun and romantic, and altogether different than the big city style.
Leaving Xitang we hopped on a rickety bus bound for Jiaxing. The tiny bus, like a clown car, was filled far beyond its intended capacity. In Jiaxing we found all the bus tickets back to Nanjing were sold out so we took a bruise-colored cab to the train station in order to try our luck there. It was shortly after 1pm when we bought the only train tickets available which would have us leaving Jiaxing at 8pm, having to go thru Shanghai. Stranded in the small city for much time, Shawna and I were chased into a dimly lit restaurant by nasty nasty storm clouds quickly fronting. There we ate and watched a young woman who was very much insane silently talk and make twitching movements. Monstrous rains were hitting the area meanwhile. The rest of the afternoon was spent at a surprisingly inexpensive all-you-can-drink teahouse.
The train station was a little sketchy seeming, and resultingly the train itself. It was such chaos getting on and having to yell at some folks who took our seats, exiling them to the "no seat" ticket holder designated area.
On the train people were so bored they would be fascinated in watching anything anyone was doing: what got me most was some adults tinkering with a toy spin that played a high-pitched squeal of the Happy Birthday song over and over and over and over and over, nonstop for maybe an hour and a half. Somehow, what could be a three hour train ride turned out to be double that, allowing our arrival into Nanjing to be approximately 2am Monday night.
Most of those midnight train riders were farmers; it was an interesting blend of people to say the least.