Tue 5 Feb 2008
I Thought My Commute Sucked Vol. XIXV
Posted by TJ under Guangzhou
“Fighting among drunken passengers and staff armed with knives, fears of being robbed by those desperate for food, and breathing air so foul that some people became dizzy….”
Metro-North on the day of the Giants parade? Not hardly.
A would-be 36 hour train trip for one Edward Wang from Guangzhou to Lanzhou (I dunno, somewhere in China) turned into a 61-hour nightmare involving crushing delays, abusive conductors, passengers drunk on the “fiery ‘bai jiu’ liquor sold by train staff, and fighting among cooks armed with knives and passengers with broomsticks.”
Massive blizzards brought the Chinese railroad to its knees, with some in-station delays lasting as much as 30 hours. Food and water ran out, though at least that fiery bai jiu held up.
Ironically, the best air to breath on these foul trains was in the bathroom, whose toilets are, thankfully, simply holes leading down to the tracks. “Sometimes people had to go to the bathroom to breathe because that was the only place with any fresh air,” Wang told the AP. “It’s funny because you normally don’t want to do that in a train bathroom.”
Once poor Mr. Wang finally got home, it hit him just how much time he’d spent on that blasted train. “In this period of time,” he said, I could have been in Moscow.”
[photo: AP]