Imagine this: 500 people in a room the size of a bank lobby. There is a giant neon sign above you with train numbers and the number of seats available. They only show the next four days, and the numbers are ticking down as they are being bought up. There are ten to twelve ticket windows, but like anywhere else in the world, only five are open. There are police there, but they are on their tea break, or nap break, or just sitting people watching. Surprisingly here isn’t too much pushing: there is some resemblance to a line, but often, there are people who are cutting in front of you because they can. If you look ahead to the beginning of the line (50 people in front of you), then you see the general push of trying to get to the window. Oh, and the line that you are in is the slowest. line. on. Earth. Welcome to a Chinese Train station.
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| happy and sweaty on the plane...waiting for take off |
An interesting note: before we decided to fly, we actually bought the train tickets at the station. Now Chinese train stations are quite complicated because it is the one thing you can not buy online. You actually have to go to the station to buy the ticket in person (or pay someone to do it for you). And to make matters worse, you can only buy train tickets up to a week ahead of time. So that means that you might want to leave on Friday, but you can’t because A: it is either too far in advance to buy the ticket or B: there are no more tickets because everyone else wants to leave on Friday and the tickets are sold out (and you are standing in line watching the numbers count down…very stressful let me tell you!). So after about two hours at the train station, we bought the tickets, got home and decided to fly! This meant that we had to go back to the train station to return the tickets. We did that the next day and fortunately the return/cancel/refund line was only about 20 people deep and moved quickly. We were there for only 40 minutes!
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