On the highrail from Hangzhou to Shanghai to meet friends of my relatives, a bit later than planned. This trip has been full of experiences and good things, but also full of fails. We might all be nearing the end of our tolerances of one another, as does happen when people spend too much time together. I just threw a temper tantrum of sorts (which is my fail and no one else’s), but there is a limit to how much aggregate fail I can take. Being impatient or annoyed, ignoring or disregarding me, losing tickets and things, walking off and getting separated, getting off the taxi early and then getting lost, being 1.5 hours late to a meeting or two, not buying train tickets in advance, not making it on our train, taking a slower train than necessary, having absolutely no time (negative?) buffer. This was just within the last 24 hours… I don’t understand how these things can happen, but they tell me that there’s no choice. If we’re talking about culture shock, I can say without a doubt that traveling with these people have given me much more culture shock than anything I’ve seen yet in Asia, with the possible exception of all the taxi drivers hovering around us and colluding (I’ll write about this later). These things have been alright so far, because they haven’t really affected any of my engagements. Well, now it has, and I really hate being late (especially with people I don’t know, who are graciously housing us, and even fronted our train tickets to Beijing).
Next time I go on a trip like this, we are going to plan our activities more than 1 day in advance (or me contributing absolutely nothing to the planning would work too).Anyway, I don’t have much to say about Hangzhou. I have some pretty pictures, and I wanted it to be a relaxing day, but I spent most of the day being stressed about making it to Shanghai, which I guess was reasonable because we missed our train. I should have just gone off seperately in the morning, bought our tickets, and then just wandered the pretty sights by myself.