In china again
mood: bahh
I am back in my city in china. After a GIANT hassle with the unorganized travel system in china.
I left manila on sunday morning and arrived in beijing on sunday afternoon and met my friends. My friends and I decided that the first thing we had to do was get a taxi and go to the train station to buy our tickets. We found a taxi driver at the airport who was being suspiciously nice to us, but decided to go with him anyways. When we got in his taxi, we found out that he had a 'rigged' taximeter, and was charging us four times the regular price. We told him to let us off and we got off on the beijing freeway between the airport and the city.
After getting off, we found another taxi and told him that we wanted to go to the train station to buy one ticket to zhang zhou and two tickets to si ping. He told us that there were two train stations and that those two tickets were at different train stations, and that we would drive us to both stations. We told him okay, and made sure his taximeter worked before we started off.
Two hours later, we arrive at the first station and my friend eric gets out of the taxi and heads into the trainstation... me and lennart dont see him again. We assumed he got his ticket and was on the way to zhang zhou.
We turned around after seeing him off and realized that our taxi had left. "Perfect," we were thinking as we tried to hail a new cab... but none of the cabs seemed to want to pick us up. We had to walk out of the train station and go some kilometers before we could find a cab to take us to the other station which, although was on the entire other side of the city, took only 20 minutes (as opposed to the first taxi that took 2 hours to go about the same distance).
Arriving at the train station, we had to find where to buy the tickets. We were scouting aruond when we saw a HUGE clump of people standing outside of 20 different windows. I decided that we werent going to stand in a four hour line, and used my 'ignorant foreigner' intution and just walked to the front of a line. At the front of the line, nothing was happening for a good ten minutes, so i decided to announce to everyone, using my chinese, that i was a foreigner and wanted to buy a ticket. Eventually a security guard came and took me and lennart to a VIP waiting room and told us that he would buy our tickets for us to take the train in two hours time. We were told to sit and relax until he came back with the tickets.
One and a half hours later... no tickets. We were bugging the official looking people and they finally told us that there werent any tickets for the next week. So we went and did what we didnt want to do and went to window #25.
Window 25 is the foreigner window and they mark up prices by about 300%, but they do offer the convenience of a semi-fluent english speaker. We show up at this window, which has no line, and tell the man that we wanted tickets. He told us that the only tickets available to siping are standing tickets. Up to this point in the trip, i havnt slept for 36 hours, and to me a standing ticket feels out of the question, but lennart told me that we could handle it. So we buy these tickets at 300% the normal price and go to the terminal to wait for the train.
At the terminal while waiting for the train, we were making sure that we watched the clock very carefully. 10 minutes to our departure, we asked the attendant to let us go to teh train, and for some reason he rushed us along without even checking to see we had tickets. When we got to the train docks, we couldnt find our train number anywhere due to lack of organization and there were no labels on anything. We asked a few people adn they told us that they would only tell us for some money, and we decided against that. When we fnially found our train, it was 2 minutes before departure, but the gate to go down to the train was closed and locked. We literally stood there, 20 feet away, as our train lurched forward and rode the rails out of sight.
In disbelief and sheer fatigure, we decide on impulse that the best idea is to take a taxi to siping which is 1300 kilometers... After we find out that the price of a taxi to siping costs the same as a roundtrip airplane ticket to manila, we both vetoed the idea and went to a cheap hotel.
We wake up at noon with cockroaches on our face and head down to the train station again. This time we are determined to get a train without messnig up. So we buy another set of standing tickets and are prompt at getting on the train and we settle in for a 12 hour standing ride to siping.
12 hours later with, many bruises, ruined shoes, much fatigue and extreme hunger we arrive in siping. We both decide that the best idea is to take a taxi in the -20 degree weather to the nearest computer cafe and to take a break before going to spend the night in a hotel.
As soon as we step out of the train terminal, there are 100 taxi drivers waiting for us. We one that we want to go to the computer cafe, but they are insisting that we go to our school. We tell them no and we want to go to the computer cafe. They tell us that it will cost 10 US dollars. We tell them no and start walking. For the whole kilometer that it took to walk to the computer cafe, we are followed by 100 taxi drivers pushing and shoving us in different directions trying to get us into their cabs. We eventually tell them that if dont stop touching us that we will beat them up, and they leave us alone. Arriving at the computer cafe, we are greeted by our friends that work here and we settle down for a good many hours sitting infront of a computer while reflecting on our horrendous trip that had so many mishaps.
Ron
This is perhaps the funniest image i have seen in a long time.
PS: Eric has such a good master. He is learning a secret kungfu style that less than 100 people in the world know. (It is really neat)
Kormiku on 01.24.06 @ 04:02 AM China [link] [1 Comment]
