Today we visited the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou outside of Shanghai. A travel agency arranged for a bus to take us there but the bus and the driver turned out to be dysfunctional. What should have taken about 1.5 hours turned into 2.5 and the air conditioning only cooled the driver and the first two people in the front. By the time we got off the bus we were all pretty disgusting. Once we entered the garden we only had about an hour to explore. The gardens were really great and I'm just sorry we couldn't have stayed longer. Then plans changed after we discovered the next garden was under construction and so we visited the zoo. There were a lot of exotic animals but the cages were really small and it actually made me sad to see the local people throwing garbage in the crates, handing the monkeys cigarettes and poking them with umbrellas. Sounds ridiculous but that's what I saw. I did see one panda but it mostly had its back to me. We then split up into two groups and I decided to go with Edwin because he was taking the train back rather than the crazy bus. Stan, Christian, Braeden, Edwin and I all visited a really cool temple with a big Buddha sitting in front of it. We climbed to the top and had a lot of fun taking pictures and goofing off. We met up with Brooke, Silvan and Ila at the train station/KFC and discovered that we couldn't get a train back to Shanghai until 8:45. They had already managed to get earlier tickets so we broke off again to get something to eat without them. Edwin had a nice restaurant picked out but the prices were a bit exorbitant so we found another one where I got curry beef, Shanghai dumplings and a couple pijious. This is when the night really got interesting. Ready? After a good meal we hopped in a couple taxis to head back to the train station. Edwin took one and the rest of us another. The driver drove hard and crazy but we got back with only 10 minutes until the train departed. Where's Edwin? Braeden swore she saw him pass in a cab so while Stan scouted the station and Christian manned the taxi drop-off, Braeden and I ran to the other side of the square. With no luck we ran back to Christian and told him we would wait for Edwin inside. We couldn't get on the train because Edwin had all the tickets. Find Edwin. Stan saw us and came running over. Just then Braeden sees Edwin with her eagle vision and burst into a sprint. I think Christian yelled something about Edwin running towards the station. Stan and Christian and I started sprinting to keep up with Braeden who had been jogging a lot before the trip apparently. I thought I would take a short cut only to be stopped by a rail and I saw everyone run past me on the other side. After maneuvering through a crowd of Chinese people like I was in a live action version of Frogger, I got through the turn-style and found everyone. I can only imagine what all those people thought when they saw five white kids sprinting across the train station. Uh oh! We had maybe a minute now and were relieved to find the line that was formed under our train number. We congratulated each other on making it in time and started joking about how ridiculous we must have looked. Edwin's face quickly changed however as it dawned on him that our line was actually waiting on the platform already. Once again we took to a sprint and flew down one flight of stairs and then up another. Thank god we made it. The train pulled up just as we stepped onto the platform and we saw our car number 14. Then we saw 13, and 12, and 11 and so on until we realized that we were at the wrong end of the train now. So we sprinted again down 14 train cars until we reached the other end and hopped on the train. Just in time. As we sat down the train was already going. After 40 minutes we were back in Shanghai and jumped on the subway to get a few blocks from the hotel. On the walk back we saw a giant LCD on the side of a building normally used for advertising. It read "Windows 2000 Professional It's now safe to turn of your computer." Hilarious! Maybe you have to be a nerd to appreciate this but it made my day 100x better. What a night.
No comments:
Post a Comment