Tourists Running Late!

Last week, my 2 college friends and I spent a few days in Xi’an, the ancient capital city of China. On our last day we went to see the most famous landmark in the city, the Terracotta Warriors. The location, where in 215 BC Chinese Emperor “Qin” (from whom “China” got its name) had forced over 700,000 laborers to build this amazing display of individually handicrafted warriors. The purpose: to protect his body after his death. It also helped me realize the great development of society, and pride of man, that has existed for thousands of years.

After getting over the shock and awe of the sight, we hurried back to catch a taxi back to our hotel, since the bus there had taken twice as long as they had told us. The first 30 minutes of our ride went great! Until the taxi driver tried to turn onto the express highway only to realize that it is closed! At that point that taxi driver, fully aware of our deadline, turned to me and asked if we had the phone number of the hotel. He wanted to know if we could have our luggage delivered to the train station because we wouldn’t have enough to go there first before catching our 2:30 train. We not only had to make it to the station on time, but we had to ask our hotel to correctly find our 8 bags in a big luggage room, locate a car big enough to fit them, and make it to the train station to meet us all in the next 20 minutes!! This on top of the fact that train tickets aren’t refundable and who knows when we could find the next ticket to where we wanted to go.

Luckily, my friend had kept the phone number for the hotel and we quickly gave them a call and explained to them the situation. Their reaction, loosely translated into English was: “You’re asking us to do what?” After my friend described all 8 of our bags in fine detail, the taxi driver and van driver of the hotel agreed on a location, and the plans were set.

We arrived near the train station at 2:10, waited a few minutes and then found the hotel van which had every one of our pieces of luggage. By 2:20 we had driven closer to the entrance, grabbed our luggage, and run 5 minutes behind a short hotel employee. All this while stealthy dodging hundreds of Chinese bystanders on our way to the train station. I thought with 10 minutes to spare we had plenty of time to get through the train station and onto our train, that is, if this station had been like all the others I had been to. It wasn’t. As I gazed towards the entrance I realized an inordinately large number of people were standing idle in a wide, tightly-packed line with railings on either side. I thought to myself, “That’s it!” We came all this way just to wait in a line and miss our train!

Then, my determined mind took over. Without checking with my two friends behind me, I took off. I pushed through (I mean “politely making my way through”) person after person with my train ticket raised high attempting to politely say, “2:30 train ticket!” Next, I had no choice but to move a crowd barracade out of the way and receive a glassy stare from a policemen, who didn’t seem to know what to do or think. We finally got to the door, up the escalator and into the lounge.

Unfortunately, the train station was very crowded and hard to figure out, so I didn’t know where to go! I ran to a policeman to give him a look at my ticket. He gave me a confused expression and then blew his whistle to have a train station employee come show us where to go. The train hadn’t left, but what used to be the line had turned into a mob of lounging people waiting for the future trains. After pushing many more people, I gave the clerk my ticket. Knowing time was short and ground still to cover, I told one of my friends that I would “stop the train” (whatever that meant) while we waited for my other friend who was caught in Chinese traffic (a common theme in this story and many others in this country). When I finally ran down to the train platform I saw people still boarding the train so I knew we had made it! We ran past 11 more train cars and finally boarded the train with a whooping 3 minutes to spare!

Not exactly an experience I would like to have repeat, especially with several hundred dollars on the line. Not to mention that we fit the model of the most stereotypical tourists to a "T". Tall, white, long-nosed foreigner with North Face pack, seemingly no manners, and little knowledge of his surroundings or why he was taking so many bags with him. Never an image I like to present. But, a decent story for a blog and one I’ll probably never forget.