I've Learned a Few Things

I don’t think I every gauged the traffic before from the park-facing room at the Shanghai Royal Meridien.  Fifty-six floors above the People’s Park, the entrance to the airport highway is right there below you.  It’s easy to see that the on-ramp looks rather stationary. Beyond the first kilometer or two the view is obscured.  But you’ve ridden this road out one hundred and ninety-nine times and this on- ramp is always backed up.  And after the merge things almost always speed up.

Today they did not.  The traffic was atrocious the whole way out.  And where as I have a highly tuned inner timer for making domestic flights just in time, I’m off when it comes to trains.  The train leaves at 2:21PM but there is no gate closing, until 2:21PM.  This is a perilous way of thinking.  And appropriately enough I arrived at the station around 2:18PM.  There’s a rudimentary security check and the gaze up at the board and race over to gate eight requires, more time than I have.

Next stop, the change-ticket line.  Every line has a minimum of twenty people queued up. “Yes, yes, it’s a great time to talk.  Glad you called.  I’m waiting in line at the train station.”   “Hi, what’s the next train to Tai’an” I ask, when I finally get my audience with the bespeckled twenty-something girl who looks a lot more tired than me.  “The next train is three hours out. There are only first class tickets left.”  “Sure I’ll take it.   How much?  Eight hundred renminbi more?  And you don’t take cards, right.  I’m gonna have to go and get cash and get back in line.”  The seat will likely be sold by then, I think to myself.  “Wait, I’ve got a regular seat.”  “Here you go.”  “No transfer fee?”  “Nope.”

Two hours and forty-five minutes on, I’ve learned a few things about the Shanghai Hong Qiao Train Station.  There is a Starbucks.  There is a Costa Coffee, as well.  They are both useless when it comes to finding a place to sit, or let alone a place to plug in.  On the west side there is a small restaurant you can get a bowl of hundun and a beer and plug in pretty easily.  I leaded back and talked and slurped and considered the train station traffic for the foreseeable.

Now I’m on the high-speed train itself.  I got my window seat.  Glad for that.  I was certain the lady would forget.  Headphones in and its Johnny Guitar Watson and Larry Williams singing “Slow Down.” It sounds like a railroad movie theme song.  I can see him picking the lead with his fingers.  Off to Shandong once again.  But this time northward from the water ways of southern Jiangsu to the dry yellow turf.