China's National Day starts the country's week-long holiday. What better way to get into the spirit of the birth of Communism than to go to the capital? We'd planned on taking the high speed train to Beijing. The circus that ensued while trying to purchase the tickets can only be described as a comedy of errors.
In order for any expat to buy tickets or travel anywhere in China, one needs a passport. With the girls on their 'China Week' trips, their passports were safely packed with their teachers. Uh oh, how were we going to purchase train tickets? We had scanned copies for the girls and hoped those would work. We went to Larry's office to pick up the copies and Larry's assistant, Carrie. She'd agreed to come with us to Beijing in order to help with the language issues as they arose.
Next stop was the bank to exchange money. Quite conveniently, we spotted a China Construction Bank branch right across the street from the train station. Quite inconveniently, they'd never, ever exchanged money. We spent close to an hour as the clerk inspected each bill at least a dozen times, ran each one through the counting machine, checked it again and then rejected about a third as they had little creases, pen marks, or specks of dust on them. Then, she wouldn't let either me or my father sign the paperwork because our passport name didn't match our chinese visa name. Huh?! Evidently, we are listed in the system as M. Whitfield or D. Libby but our passports have our full name... or was it the other way? An hour later, Carrie had to sign the paperwork.
Certainly, buying the tickets wouldn't be as difficult. The downtown station is huge and though the lines were long, at least they seemed to be moving. After walking a half mile to the right ticket line, Carrie stopped suddenly and her faced dropped. She immediately ran to one of the security guards. Dear lord, were all the tickets sold out? I mean, it was a holiday. No, still plenty of tickets for sale...just not advanced tickets. Those tickets were sold at the downtown ticket office. Wait, I thought that's where we were. No, we were at the station, there is another ticket office in Old Town. Another hour down.
We found the ticket office and climbed the stairs. Mom stayed in the car. As we neared the window, I realized I didn't have Larry's passport. "Oh, S*#t!" Carrie tried to talk the agent into letting us purchase one ticket without the passport. Nope, not gonna happen. I texted Larry to tell him Mr. Liu was on his way back to get his passport. His response was...colorful to say the least. By now, we were all fuming and starving. We walked to the closest, least scary restaurant we could find. Can't go wrong with KFC...well, you can, but we were all so hungry we would have and probably did eat rat. An hour and a fifteen minutes later, Mr. Liu returned with Larry's passport. I exchanged it with a sandwich as he hadn't eaten either.
Back at the ticket counter, a bit of an arguement occurred. The copy of Katie's passport was dark and the agent couldn't read the last couple of numbers. I tried to show him the number was located elsewhere on the copy, but he preferred to aggravate me. Again, after some begging from Carrie, we FINALLY left with first-class high-speed train tickets for all of us to Beijing.
We dropped off Carrie at the factory and then sped to one of the apartment complexes to meet Katie upon her return from Yangzhuo. Of course, we arrived at the same time I received a text saying they were going to be late. No problem. Well, no problem unless you have a replaced hip and knee and you have to go to the bathroom in a chinese toilet. Without unnecessary details or an emergency trip to the hospital, my mom returned unscathed.
Six and a half hours later, we sat at the kitchen table with our glasses of wine and hoped our trip to Beijing would be worth the headache we'd just endured. We joked that the day wasn't a complete bust since Mom did master the 'squatty potty'.
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