Stranded by Snow
I didn’t actually make it Beijing last weekend. This is not the first time I’ve been prevented from going on a trip. Weather conditions went from bad to terrible very quickly on the night of my departure. I’ve been assured that the cold and snow are very unusual for this time of year. Especially the snow, which it almost never does in Xi’an because it is so dry. Regardless I was very disappointed to not have been able to visit Beijing. Hopefully I will find another time to go before the end of the semester. The entire series of events from me leaving my apartment to coming back to it were extremely harrowing, and are more or less as follows.
I left my apartment at 5 PM. I caught a bus and arrived at the airport shuttle about half an hour later. As soon as I was within walking distance a tout approached me asking if I was going to the airport in very broken English. It was really just “airport? Airport?” I said yes and continued walking.
“Taxi? You want taxi?”
“No, I will take the bus” [NOTE: the italicized parts are in Chinese]
“What time is your flight?”
“8 o’clock”
“The bus takes two and a half hours to get to the airport, you need to take a taxi.”
So here are the things working against this particular tout: I live in Xi’an, I have taken the shuttle bus plenty of times before, and I’m not an idiot. So instead of telling him all of these things in Chinese, I simply play the dumb tourist.
“What? Huh?”
To another guy, “Can you speak English? [Something I didn’t quite catch because by this point I was ignoring him]”
The second guy tried to tell me the same thing but I was already half-way on the bus and didn’t care what they had to say. Boy are touts annoying sometimes.
So I make it to the airport in the usual amount of time it takes (about an hour to an hour and a half). Unfortunately I made a mistake on my flight time; it was actually 8:40 PM so I had a bit of waiting to do.
After checking in and going through security I waited again. At about 8:20 the announcement was made that my flight was delayed until 9:50.
More waiting.
Finally we boarded the plane at 10:15.
More waiting. For four hours. Four hours on that Godforsaken plane.
We returned to the terminal at 2:15 AM. The flight had been canceled. The weather had become so bad that all flights were canceled until 10 AM. Fantastic.
So I took the shuttle back to the city. Stepping off the bus, another tout approached me.
“You need a taxi? Where are you going?”
“Foreign Language School”
“40 RMB”
For a 13 RMB ride? I don’t think so.
“40 RMB? That is too expensive! Use the meter”
He gave the universal sign for no (waving his hands and shaking his head) and directed me to a different taxi.
So I entered the taxi.
After telling him my destination, he opened up with, “20 RMB.” Seriously, what is it with these touts? Do I really look like that much of a dumb tourist?
“Use the meter.”
“No, no no. I can’t use the meter.”
“Use the meter or I will get out of the taxi!”
Finally he flipped on the meter and away we went. I didn’t make it into my apartment until 4 AM. What a horrible ordeal.
And I still haven’t been to Beijing!
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i would KILL
or cry.
Ah, the trials and tribulations of not blending in. Great story!
@Laura: yeah it sucked a lot. It’s a good thing boys don’t cry
@Alan: I especially don’t blend in, being a head taller than everyone else here. I suspect that no matter what I do I will always appear to be a dumb loawai, how annoying!