INCONVENIENCE & ADVENTURE - part I

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." (G. K. Chesterton)

I was in Changchun (a city a few hours south) over the weekend, and let's just say that my return this Sunday was one of these adventures.


I originally planned to go back on a 7 PM train, but when a ticket for a 3:15 PM train came available, I decided to return early since I teach at 8 AM on Mondays. There were 5 other women I knew taking this train - one woman who's old enough to be my mom, one woman the age of my sister (late twenties), one woman a bit older than my sister (mid-thirties), one ten-month-old, and one four-month-old.

The 6 of us arrived at the train station at 2:50. We were cutting it close. We paid a porter 5 kuai to cart some baggage from the cab to the train station entrance, grabbed our bags, squeezed in through the funnel-like door way, and put our bags on the only running X-ray scanner. The crowd pushed us to the other side of the scanner where we grabbed our bags and hurried our way to the escalator. Once at the top, we checked the train schedule to find where to go, then wove our way through main hall to the number 4 waiting hall.

This hall actually is both numbers 3 and 4. There's probably 8 aisles with a row of 100 chairs on each side. Each aisle is about 10 feet across, it can fit 8 people standing or 6 people sitting on their luggage, side by side. It's crowded, but that's just how a train station is supposed to be.

We see a sign for our train over one of the aisles; it's 3:00 right now, and there's a thick line clogging the entire aisle. They'll probably let us through to the platform soon, we think. We wait... it's 3:10 ... how come the line's not moving yet? During this whole time there's been lots of eyes on us, particularly on the two babies. We watch these people out of the corners of our eyes ... and then we see that some of them are moving to a different aisle. Are we in the wrong line??? I don't remember how it happened, but somehow we realized we should follow them.

One aisle over, there's no line at all. We rush up to the ticket taker at the gate and show her our ticket. She glances at it and says to me, "晚点儿" (wan dianr). "什么?" I ask. She replies again, "晚点儿" . My Chinese skills still leave much to be desired, and this situation shows why - I immediately thought it meant that we were late! Couldn't they help us out? There were two little babies and we look as foreign as foreign can be! How were we suppose to know that the line changed!

In my disbelief, I asked some of those that we had followed. Maybe they were on the same train. I was so confused that I'm not sure what language I was speaking. The first man I talked to had an accent to thick for me to understand.

Our friend always looks after us, and he was looking after us then. I turn and see a girl wearing a pink baseball cap. She's a junior management major at Jilin University, who also was going to Harbin on the same train. She steps up and says to us "It's late." We go back and forth in Chinese and English a bit until I finally comprehend the situation. Chinese is a contextual language. Finally I understood that the context was the train, not us. "晚点儿” means "(The train) is late."

It's going to be late 2 hours and 3 minutes. So we sit down in that emptier aisle ... luckily there were 4 chairs open right next to each other. We sit and we wait and we wait and we wait...