Adventures in Traveling: Bus trips, train stations, and taxi drivers

Last Friday saw me leaving Shanghai for the first time since I arrived here at the end of August to attend a wedding in Ji’nan (more on that in a few weeks).

It’s not very far from Shanghai to Ji’nan, merely three and a half hours by bullet train, which is quite okay for a distance of around 730 km.

But let me start from the beginning. And, because I am who I am, and have been heavily influenced by Victor Hugo’s writing style, let me start by giving you an incomplete overview about Shanghai’s transportation system in general. In fact, let me take this opportunity to warn you: This is a very long post. There is an (extremely brief) summary at the end though, so feel free to skip everything and read the summary. 

~~~

The metro system in Shanghai is great. And I encourage anyone who doesn’t read Chinese incredibly well (people like me, for instance) to stick to it. At the moment, there are 17 metro lines, which can take you to almost any area in Shanghai, and all the signs in and around the metro station and the metro itself are both in Chinese and English. They even announce the stops in English!

With a combination of taxis and the metro, you can go pretty much anywhere in Shanghai without having to be able to read even a single character, and if your destination isn’t super remote, it won’t cost a lot of money either.

~~~

Of course, there are busses in Shanghai too. Many of them, in fact. There are more than 1000 (read: one thousand) regular bus lines and some special lines in addition to that. But for non-Chinese-readers, they are very difficult to navigate, because absolutely everything (from the stop signs to the bus schedule) is written in Chinese characters only, and I wouldn’t hold out hope that the bus driver speaks English.

Riding a bus in China is actually quite the experience. Once you’re on the bus, and miraculously on the right one, it’s a combination of good timing, thorough preparation, and pure luck to get off at the correct stop. The busses are usually crowded, you can’t rely on the driver to always stop at red lights or stay on the bus lane when they could drive on the motorcycle lane equally as well, and I’ve been on busses whose doors wouldn’t close on more than one occasion.

What’s most difficult, though, is finding out if you can even take the bus. There is no English trip planning tool available online for Shanghai, or at least not one that’s complete and doesn’t require you to know the actual Chinese names of the bus stops nearest to your location. More than anything else, this is what makes incorporating a short trip by bus, no matter how convenient it might be, almost impossible for foreigners – you can’t take the bus if you don’t know that there’s supposed to be one, or if you have no idea where the bus is going and stopping.

So, when at the beginning of the semester, Ms Zhang from the international office of my university sent an email to all of us and attached a bus schedule in English for all the busses that stop at our campus, I was delighted.

And I was even more delighted to find that there is a bus that stops both at the campus and at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station (which is the railway station you’ll likely need to go to in Shanghai if you’re going somewhere by high speed train).

Because, you see, my campus is on the outskirts of Shanghai, and so is Hongqiao Railway Station. They are actually not that far apart (well, for Shanghai’s standard, anyway), but going there by metro requires taking Line 11 for around an hour into the city centre to change to Line 2 and go to the railway station, whereas a bus can follow a more direct route.

Naturally, due to some very poor phrasing, some of the information on the schedule is rather difficult to interpret at times (such as where on campus each of the bus stops is to be found), but I wasn’t too worried. I figured that I could easily enough ask about the stops’ location when I actually needed them.

~~~

I probably should have predicted what was going to happen. But it seems even though this is my fourth time in this country, I’m still quite naïve in some regards.

When I planned my trip to the train station on Friday I was uncharacteristically careful to plan for enough time. My train was set to leave at 6pm, so I decided I would take the bus at 2pm. 

It was the perfect plan: I had an appointment with Ms Zhang at the International Office at 1:15pm anyway, and when I was there I would simply seize the opportunity to ask her where I had to go to get on the bus.

I was told by Ms Zhang (who, remember, had compiled all the information on the busses and sent it to us) that she actually had no idea where the bus stop was, but not to worry, she would make a phone call. On the phone, she was told that nobody was quite sure if the bus in question still existed, or otherwise, if it still stopped next to our campus.

Ms Zhang assured me that it would all be cleared up if I just went to the entrance gate, where I was sure to find the bus stop. I wasn’t quite so sure, but I wasn’t really worried either. In case I didn’t find the bus stop, I told myself, I would simply take a taxi to the next metro station. Not ideal, as I knew it was going to take significantly longer by metro, but okay. It was 1:45pm, and I still had plenty of time.

In no surprise to anyone, I found two bus stops, neither of which has any bus going to the railway station stopping at them. So I turned towards the street to get a taxi.

~~~

Some of the most baffling things I learnt when I was in China for the first time were somehow related to taxis.

For one thing, there aren’t any seat belts on the back seats. For another, the driving varies between chaotic and downright terrifying. It’s also no good expecting the taxi driver to understand any English. Print out the address of wherever you want to go in Chinese. Ideally in a big font size – I’ve had taxi drivers turn me down because their eyesight wasn’t good enough to read the address (which doesn’t really inspire my particular trust in a driver).

But, for the sake of my story, none of those things are relevant.

Here’s what is relevant: You can’t simply call a taxi in China. I had never questioned the Austrian way of doing this, but here, you don’t make a phone call ordering a taxi to your location. Instead, you go find a big, ideally busy, street and hope that a free taxi passes you by.

Don’t rejoice once you’ve seen one, though. There is absolutely no guarantee that the driver will react to your beckoning it over, and even if he does, in my experience you need to stop at least two taxis before someone will agree to take you. This, especially, still feels weird to me. We’re apparently spoilt like queens and kings in Europe, because we simply get into the taxi and tell the driver where to go.

Stop. Not so fast. In China, you tell the driver through an open window where you want to go, and if they’re agreeable and the distance you want to go is neither too short nor too far, and your chosen destination isn’t, heaven forbid, in an area that’s in any way inconvenient to the driver, they might agree to take you in.

In all honesty, you have to realise that I am exaggerating, but not by very much, promise.

~~~

Anyway, that’s exactly what happened to me on Friday. I couldn’t say anymore how many taxis I tried to wave over; most of them ignored them, but quite a few stopped. Not a single one wanted to take me to the metro station. It’s quite a short trip (5 minutes by car, because there is a sort of highway between the university and the metro station), but too far to walk if time is at least somewhat of the essence. At that point, it was 3pm.

So I turned to one of the men guarding the entrance, asking him to help me. He was incredibly friendly, but even when he tried to recruit people to take me to the metro station, he failed.

There’s a shuttle going to the closest metro station from university. It’s even free of charge, and I wanted to take it, but they leave only once an hour, on the other end of the campus (which we’ve already established is very big) and I didn’t know when. I approached the guard about it, and immediately realised that I wouldn’t make it there in time to catch the next one.

I was ready to stop a random car and offering the driver an exorbitant sum for taking me to the bus station. The fact that, instead, ended up catching the free shuttle bus after all is only thanks to the guard, who stopped the bus when it drove through the entrance gate and convinced the driver to let me in. I haven’t seen him since, otherwise I’d have already given him a packet of cigarettes (the gift of choice for men in China). Because of him, I finally, at 3:45pm, reached the metro station.

It was pretty smooth sailing from there, and I arrived at the railway station at half past 5. It’s a miracle that I ended up catching my train.

~~~

Why, you ask? Couldn’t I simply buy a ticket and go to the platform?

The short answer is: No.

There’s a long answer, too.

First of all, Hongqiao Railway Station is huge. It took me 10 minutes of jogging to get from the metro station to the actual train station. I also still had to pick up my ticket. I had bought it online weeks ago, but you can’t travel without an officially issued ticket – simply printing the payment confirmation isn’t enough. And there was a long queue, as it was a busy day.

More importantly, (and time-consumingly) though, Chinese railway stations are a bit like mini-airports. You have to queue for the security check (and, as previously mentioned, there were a lot of people), your bags are checked, and you need to present your passport (or, if you’re a Chinese citizen, your ID card) in order for them to even let you into the station, never mind the train.

Once you’re through security and got ticket, you can’t simply waltz straight onto the platform, either.

You have to find your gate, and there is a window of five to ten minutes where the gate is open and you can get onto the platform. Once the gate is closed (five minutes before the train leaves, in my experience), you won’t get onto the platform anymore, even if the train hasn’t left and you’ve got a valid ticket.

~~~

I managed to get onto the train, and I had a great time in Ji’nan. And in the grand scheme of things, this little adventure was no real adventure at all. It was, however, a great opportunity to provide everyone with a comprehensive introduction to different means of public transport in China.

One more thing: I hope nobody thinks I’m complaining about poor Ms Zhang. Releasing a bus guide for international students without really understanding what they have written (or having any further information on the busses) is very typical for many Chinese people in my experience, which is why I mentioned it.
She is a lovely person, though, and has helped me a lot since I’ve arrived here.

~~~

In summary: Research thoroughly before planning on taking the bus, plan for enough time if you are at a remote location (or want to go somewhere far from the city centre) to find a willing taxi driver, and don’t mistake Chinese railway stations for the ones your familiar with – you’ll need a lot more time here.

~~~

I’ll try to be back on Sunday or Monday, but no promises. Until then I wish you all a wonderful weekend!