So having your hostel write out a note for you in Chinese isn’t totally foolproof. 
We found this out the hard way, when boarding our train the other night from Shanghai to Xi’an. We thought we had booked a soft sleeper. We had asked the girl at our hostel to write out the note asking for a soft sleeper. What we really purchased were two top bunk hard sleepers. Now, this isn’t the end of the world, but it was far from the comfortable experience we were expecting. Soft sleepers are in berths of 4 beds with doors that shut out the noise and smoke from the hallways of the train. Hard sleepers are berths of 6, sans door. The top beds have about 2 feet of clearance from the ceiling, making sitting upright impossible. To add insult to injury, Keith’s been fighting a bad stomach bug, making for a less than pleasant ride. On the upside, we did save a bit of money, which will help pay for a very, very small percentage of the very expensive JR Rail Passes we purchased for our two weeks in Japan. There’s always a silver lining.
Also, we finally found the Japan guidebook we had been looking for all those hours in Shanghai. While sitting in the common area of our hostel on our very last day in the city, Keith noticed a DK Eyewitness Japan Guide, in English, sitting on a bookshelf. We’re not sure if it had been there all along, and I’d like to think it wasn’t, but the good news is that we were able to trade a book we had already read for the elusive guidebook. Sometimes the travel gods work in mysterious ways.
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We’re bringing that exact same guidebook to Japan with us. We can’t wait – less than 2 weeks now before we hit the road again.