Organization for dummies

We got up early today and headed to the train station to grab tickets to spend the day in Wuxi. I should briefly describe the state of Chinese train stations during the Spring Festival. Remember the context though, everything around us is written in Chinese, and we can guess 15 characters out of thousands. Back to the description, imagine 20 Michael Jacksons, each of them sitting at a desk. They all fired their bodyguards yesterday night. Add 600 teenagers, fans of Michael Jackson. They don’t want to wait and yet, they have not heard about the “stay in the line” concept. We get this math:

600 / 20 = 30 fans per desk
Swaps needed:

• Michael Jackson -> Train station employee
• Teenager -> Chinese willing to go home to visit his family

Here we are

9 o’clock, I jumped in the crowd to get our tickets. Luckily, I came out 15 minutes later. Julien took a look at the tickets and said “cool! We are leaving this afternoon at 3pm. We were supposed to spend the day in Wuxi, not 2 hours!”. So I went back in there, got our money back and asked the guy for tomorrows tickets, “You are in today’s tickets selling building, you should go to tomorrows ticket selling building instead”, he answered. What kind of railway station is this? Do they have buildings for every god damn day?? Half an hour later, we found the so wanted building and got our tickets for Wuxi, we will leave tomorrow morning. It is 10:30am, let’s think what we do today, visit Shanghai, alright, what about the next days? Since we want to stay at most two nights in Shanghai, we should buy tickets for tomorrow night for Hangzhou. We have to be careful with the timing though; we don’t want to miss the train to Hangzhou if the train back from Wuxi is late, right? Let’s settle it, let’s think it over (we are still in the train station):

• We have tickets two Wuxi (go and return), but we care more about going to Hangzhou.
• Best theory: we find a train to Hangzhou; it leaves at least half an hour after our train back from Wuxi’s arrival.
• Middle theory: we can find tickets for Hangzhou, but the departure time is too early. We manage to sell back the train ticket for Wuxi and waste no money.
• Worse theory: we have no tickets for Hangzhou before 1 week, we can’t get our money back for Wuxi, our hotel doubles the prices, China is bombed by the Japanese and Michael Moore turns out to be Bush and Monica Lewinsky’s secret son. Meanwhile, Jacques Chirac informs the Chinese government that France is planning to suspend the textile cooperation. Thus, Chinese people hate French people.

Considering these 4 theories, we jumped back in the Michael Jackson’s fans to practice our Chinese. Thankfully, the nature preferred the Middle theory. Forget about Wuxi, we have more time to visit Shanghai and we leave for Hangzhou tomorrow at 11:30am.
What’s next: Old city and Yu Garden.

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