Paul, Ibbi, and myself missed our train to Beijing. Why? you may ask. Well, #1 we apparently do not have the most common sense in the world, and #2, we hit the worst possible traffic EVER in our taxi ride to the train station. Ugghh. Disappointing and dumb to say the least. We've been to the train station before, when we went to Hangzhou last month, so we knew the routine: take the 8 minute taxi ride to the station, go through security, sit in the waiting area of our designated train until it's time to board. So we left an hour before our train was scheduled to depart, but it just wasn't enough. What we did not anticipate was the traffic on the highway. How often do you get traffic at 9 at night? Out of the many taxi rides that we've taken throughout this city, we have never hit traffic on the highway that lasted more that 10 minutes. Today was different. It took us 55 minutes to get to the station. A trip that should have taken under ten. Halfway through, I showed the taxi driver our ticket and asked him if he thought we would make it on time, he smiled and assured me that we would get there no problem. He was wrong. The train was scheduled to depart at 10pm sharp. We arrived at 10:05pm. It had already left.
Sooooo, we shook our heads, talked about our stupidity for not leaving earlier, as well as our unluckiness, and laughed it off. What else can you do? We sold back our tickets for 80% of the original price, and we weighed our options. Taxi drivers were soliciting us to drive us to Beijing today, which they said would cost us about $450 per guy to get there, so that was out of the question. Then we considered scalped tickets for tomorrow, about $75 per guy. Then we decided that we should just buy tickets from the Train Station for $25, the same seats on the same train that we had the misfortune of missing. We bought new tickets for next Thursday. Probably the best choice out of our possible options. Again, we depart at 10pm from Shanghai. This time, we'll be taking the subway to get to the station, as it is a sure thing - no traffic possibilities. And, we'll be leaving 2 hours before our scheduled departure time. No harm in waiting.
Moral of the story? Plan ahead and prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. We're thinking that this change in plans will actually work to our benefit: #1, we're leaving on Thursday now, instead of Friday, so we'll have an extra day in Beijing; #2, hopefully we can arrange for a different train ride home as opposed to taking the 24 hour ride with no air conditioning and horrible comfort situations, #3, more time to plan and research for the trip. Ohh, and #4, now I get to play soccer this weekend :-) ...Big game Sunday evening!
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PMM
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