Other Plans for Lunch

I’ve got to head to Jinan this afternoon.  But first I have a meeting over in the north part of the city near the third ring road.  Flipping up my lap top I consider the afternoon train schedule.  There is one first class ticket left on the three o’clock train, one on the four o’clock train and one on the four thirty train.  After that there are no more high speed trains.  Only hard sleeper berths on the good old fashioned trains of my early China days. 

This journey will be undertaken with a colleague so the one ticket per train option doesn’t seem like a winner.  After a chat with my colleague, who hasn’t gotten a ticket either I decide I may as well just get one if I can.  One after the other the web interface informs me that the tickets, which I was trying to buy, have vanished.  There are no more tickets available that will get me to Jinan before midnight.  There are no direct flights from Beijing to the city.  There are no flights to the next city over, Weifang, either.  I explore a few more drive and plane and drive and train combos, none of which is realistic. 

Communicating all this to my colleague, he suggests we’ll drive.  It is a rather important meeting and I can consider this.  “I’m here now.  How far are you?” I ask him.  “Need ten minutes.”  Standing on the street I look for a place to get out of the sun and sit on the front wall of a parking garage.  From inside the unenviable pillbox office area, the guard eyes me suspiciously.  I turn to my phone and enter in “Jinan” as the destination in my phone’s GPS application.  Wow.  Five and a half hours?  The high-speed train is only ninety-minutes. 

Not stopping to consider for very long how the five-hour drive from New York to Boston would be rather different with a ninety-minute train to hop on, I back away from a woman approaching with a Styrofoam box and a toddler on the front of her bicycle.  The toddler hops off the bike and she adjusts the scarf on her head beside all the smart professionals walking up and down the street for lunch.  She pops open her white box and props up a little sign and commences to shout out to all the passers by that she has noodle lunch boxes for sale.  I consider her accent and her child who isn’t in school and decide that she is some construction workers’ wife, trying to add some income, here in the city, where they won’t teach her child.  No one pays her any mind.  Everyone, myself included, has other plans for lunch.  Finally, a young woman, who seems to recognize the lady stops and buys one of her lunch meals. 

Friday, 8/25/17