I am feeling quite glad that the abrupt drying up of all my work means that I may not have any need to take public transport around Beijing again for the next week.
The seething masses on the subway, encumbered with much luggage and making their way towards train and bus stations with a view to returning to their home towns before the start of the Spring Festival holiday (still 10 days away!), already becoming an unpleasant phenomenon on Monday and Tuesday of this week, have grown quite intolerable today.
If you root around my archives, you will find quite a few pieces on the irritations of travelling on the subway in Beijing - chiefly to do with the bizarrely inconsiderate behaviour of your fellow passengers. Luckily for me, I haven't been having to use the subway that much in recent months, and very seldom in the rush hours; so, I had been rather forgetting just how horrendous the experience can become.
Now, I know every country in the world is plagued by the solipsistic arseholes who stop dead as soon as they step through the doors of a subway carriage, even though they have plenty of space to move further inside, and even though they should be well aware that there is a large crowd of people impatient to board behind them. However, in most other countries I've been in, I think, such people are in the minority; often indeed, I'd like to think, a fairly small minority. Amongst the Chinese, it's very nearly 100%.
At this time of year, this vexation is given an added refinement: people who stop dead on the threshold of the carriage and drop all their luggage at their feet. You only need two or three of these gits to do this, and you have an impenetrable barrier preventing anyone else from getting on or off the train through this door. Ggrrrrr.......
I must be patient. I must try to think calm thoughts. The seasonal rush appears to be peaking early this year; by next Friday, the madness should be subsiding. And then we may have a week or two of relative peace and quiet.
3 comments:
I don't remember things being that bad the last year or two. But maybe I didn't ride the subway that much around the holidays.
I'm not sad to be out of BJ for the firecracker madness this year.
No, I can't ever remember it being this bad before either, not in the numbers nor in starting so early.
Maybe it's just a gradual increase in subway traffic with the new lines that have linked up the centre to the outlying areas in the last year or so.
Then again, I do hear people say that the clearout may be more thoroughgoing this year, because a lot of the ming gong have either lost their jobs (in construction and so on; I guess a lot of major projects have reached completion this year), or are being flushed out by the government as a 'security measure'.
Thinking about the barricade-builders (in the subway trains, that is; we haven't quite got there out on the streets yet!), and trying to be as charitable as possible, I suppose people who don't use the subway that often don't realise that the doors always open on the same side, and thus that the best place to pile up luggage is against the doors opposite, which are never in use. However, it wouldn't take a huge effort of imagination to realise that just dumping all your bags directly inside the open doors is going to create a hazard for anyone else trying to get either on or off the train. Even more unforgivable when there's actually a fair amount of space inside the carriage.
Post a Comment