Confusing

I've been using the Yonghegong subway stop a lot recently. The station has been much expanded and modernised, as it is now an interchange between the old loop line, Line 2, and the new north-south line, Line 5.

Exiting from Line 5, I always get in a bit of a muddle.

You see, the exit labelled "North-West" is actually the North-East exit; while the one labelled "North-East" is....... South-West! There is also a South-East exit, but god knows what that's labelled - and I think perhaps there's no access to it from the Line 5 platform anyway (I did manage to get out from that one a couple of weeks ago; but perhaps only by going via the Line 2 platform - a bit of a long detour).

I think the problem here is that most of the subway stations on Line 2 have a sensible complement of 4 exits, one at each of the points of the compass around a major intersection on the 2nd Ringroad. In the past, they were generally just named Exits A, B, C, and D. Now that they've started identifying exits also by points of the compass at some of the newer stations, I imagine that the people in charge of printing the signs have just lazily assumed that Exit A is always the North-West exit, and so on. But, at the stations that have only 2 or 3 exits, this is not alwaysthe case. No-one seems to have noticed yet.

Only in China??

Well, perhaps not. But they do seem to have a special flair for this sort of creative ineptitude here. The Olympics, I'm sure, will produce a goodly portion of accidental hilarity.