What Was I Thinking?
I was staying in Shanghai and had to make a trip to meet some people in Hangzhou, about 170km south of Shanghai. The journey takes about an hour in a high-speed train. Being the seasoned traveller and well-adjusted digital immigrant that I am, I had purchased my tickets on the internet weeks in advance. There was no way I was going to mess this up. The day before my trip, I meticulously planned my route from my hotel to the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, giving myself plenty of time to get there. My train departure time was 8:36a.m. - a small warning bell should have gone off in my head when I saw that departure time. Why 8:36? Why not 8:30 or 8:45, even 8:35, but 8:36? Anyway, I got to the station at around 8a.m.
The first surprise of the day was the size of the station. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have flown on international flights out of airports smaller than the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station.
I should briefly explain at this juncture, that this station, unlike any other I have ever been in, is built above the actual railway lines. The gate is a solid high-tech sliding door which leads through to an escalator, which descends down to the platform. One is unable to see any trains in the concourse area and the first glimpse you get of a train is when you get to the bottom of the escalator.
Anyway, it was now 8:32a.m. as I quickly made my way back across the concourse to gate B and joined the long queue there. I wasn’t at all surprised when by 8:34a.m. the gate still hadn’t opened. By 8:36a.m. I was feeling smugly justified in my assessment of Asian train time-tables. Then my eye fell on a small sign in English just outside the sliding door of the gate that read, “no entrance to platform permitted after 5 minutes before train departure”.
Huh!? I saw the words, but something was not computing. I read it again. There was no mistaking what it said and yet, here I was in a queue at 8:37a.m. with hundreds of other travellers waiting for the 8:36a.m. train.
Or...
were...
we?
With growing trepidation, I read the sign again and then in a moment of startling clarity, noticed, for the first time, that the tickets in the hands of my fellow passengers were a different colour to the ticket clutched in my, now suddenly sweaty, hand. I quickly looked at the ticket belonging to the chap next to me and saw that his ticket was for the 8:55a.m. train. I felt the blood draining from my head as I realised that my train was gone already and these fellow passengers whom I was happily queuing with were actually not fellow passengers, but travellers getting ready to depart on the next train... because everybody knows that train schedules in China run like clockwork and that the gates to the platforms open about 15 minutes before the trains depart and close exactly 5 minutes before departure...don’t they?
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