I've always had a bit of a problem with public transport. Is it the joggling motion, or the strangely soothing rhythms of rattle and rumble? Or the sullen silence of the other passengers? Or just the boredom? I always sleep very easily on trains, buses, trams, the subway. Back in my Bar School days, I was living way out in Poplar in East London and taking a post-midnight bus home quite often; several times I woke up in the terminus miles further to the east, and had to wait 20 minutes (and buy a new fare) before the bus would turn around and take me back. I recounted the other day a particularly horrendous example from the year before, where, severely pissed up after attending a Pogues concert, I fell asleep on the Tube and found myself stranded in the eastern wastelands of London at 1am on a freezing cold night.
It's happened to me here in China too. One of the two main subway lines in the centre of Beijing, Line 2 (or 'the Blue Line') is a circle. Well, actually, a rectangle: it largely follows the line of the city's 2nd Ringroad, which in turn was mapped on to the medieval city wall (which Mao wantonly destroyed in the 1950s). There are, I think, 18 stops in all, and it used to take a little under 50 minutes to complete the loop. These days, it's got a little faster (mainly, I think, through shortening the platform stops, rather than boosting the speed of the trains), and it's advertised as being a 40-minute circuit (although in practice it always seems to take a few minutes longer than that - I have checked a couple of times, in a spirit of scientific enquiry).
Anyway, three years ago, I had been taken out to dinner by a small group of mature students I was teaching (fairly senior officials in local government departments). Much beer had been drunk. Many toasts to improved international co-operation and goodwill had been exchanged (downed in baijiu, the appalling local rotgut spirit). I was, I confess, a little bit squiffy. Not a lot, just a bit. But tired, too. 'Tired & emotional', if you will.
The evening wrapped up quite early (the Chinese like their early nights; sometimes they like their late nights too, but mostly they like their early nights), and I was getting on the subway home at about 9pm. I was boarding at Xuanwumen station in the south-west corner of the Blue Line, and heading to Jishuitan at the north-west corner: only 5 or 6 stops, it should have taken about 15 minutes. Next thing I know, I am in Dongsi ShiTiao station, 5 stops beyond Jishuitan. And it is 10.20pm!! I have evidently completed one-and-a-half full circuits in a comatose slumber. It was lucky that I awoke when I did, because the system closed down pretty early (it's a bit better nowadays, but the gaps between trains towards the end of the evening are LONG), and I was only just in time to catch the last train back in the other direction.
I can't be the only person this has ever happened to! But I am perhaps the only person to have owned up to it. I still get a lot of derision about this incident from my friends.
2 comments:
around the loop 1 and a half times --- asleep! you weren't robbed? was the train crowded when you got on and when you woke up? I'm just trying to imagine the subway crowds staring at a giant laowai snoring endlessly on the train.
No, I was fine. I really don't think petty theft is that much of a problem on the Subway - it's still not really crowded enough (except in the rush hour to facilitate that kind of thing), and your Ordinary Joe Pickpocket thinks the 3 kuai fare is pretty steep!
And this is 3 years ago: back then, the Subway was pretty much deserted at non-peak hours.
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