Today I went down to the train station to buy a ticket to Chengdu for tonight. I’ve been inured to taxi charges from the last few weeks of Mom travelling so I hailed a cab and got in and said Huo Che Zhan (train station). And the driver turned her meter on and started to turn around.
“No no no,” I said, “Huo Che Zhan,” and pointed in the direction of the station. And then she started going off about charging me twenty Yuan for the trip. I got into an argument with her because she’d already turned on the meter and I know for a fact that the train station is a fifteen Yuan cab ride away. Eventually she stopped the cab to argue better so I got out.
Now I was ticked off at cab drivers, who until this month have never given me any problems in Wanzhou, so I went off to find a bus.
The problem with taking a bus to the train station is that on our street the train station bus only goes right around when a train gets in or leaves. I was going at neither of those times (it’s easy to tell when there are only two trains per day that have anything to do with your shithole burgh). So I hiked down a million steps to another road where different buses that go that direction go. I got on one and rode it until it turned away from the train station sign. Thence began my hiking.
I kind of know where the train station is. It’s in the part of town that looks like a sleeping dragon could grab it as a midnight snack. After a bit of a hike I could see the dragon’s nose, so I tried to find a clear vantage point to find the station. This involved traipsing through some fields until I saw a clock off in the distance that looked like it might be on top of a stationish kind of building.
I followed a guy carrying a gigantic bamboo pole through a field and eventually got to the Wanzhou Vocational College which I skirted around until I got to the bottom of a cliff face I recgonized. At the top of that cliff is a little lookout point that I looked out from while waiting for a train in October.
After that it was a short climb to the station and a long wait in line for my ticket. I completely disrupted the ticket lady’s rhythm because she asked me the same question she’d been asking everyone and I answered it wrongly. Eventually I got through it in my order, which also worked for her and I got my ticket. I leave at 8:46 tonight.
Then it’s on to Thailand. I can’t promise lots of blogging, but there’ll probably be a bit more than there was the past few weeks with my mom being here.
