VIPs

Ten days in advance.

That used to be the earliest that you could buy train tickets in China.  Now, it's only five days in advance.

FIVE.

Ten days in advance seemed a little inconvenient during peak seasons, because you pretty much have to "get in line" in a culture that doesn't get in line early at the train ticket office, hoping that by the time you get there you have a clear enough mind to order the right date, time, and kind of tickets you want for the train, and hope that they'll still have tickets left. It's like when I tried to buy tickets for Jack Johnson on ticketmaster.com the day they went on sale and the lawn seats were already sold out by the time I got through.

Now it's five days in advance. And it is currently a peak season for train tickets, since students are leaving their homes and training to the cities where they go to school. So when, Aaron and I trained to visit friends, arriving five days before we wanted to return home, we immediately got in line at the ticket counter to buy our return tickets. We waited in line for an hour at 7:30 am, and by the time we got to the counter at 8:30am - the tickets had already been sold out for all of the trains going back to our city for the day we wanted to go back. The ticket office had only been open for 3 hours!

After failing the second day to come up with another option for how to get back home (and being told it would be best if we could just wait to go back home until the middle of September), we decided to get up at 5:00 in the morning and get a ride to the train station so we could be in line when the tickets went on sale. On our way to the train station, our driver could not understand why we would need to get up so early. Then we pulled up to the train station. It was busier than it was the other day.

We got in line, then noticed a line that had no people in it, labeled for "important people." Deciding I was important enough, or at least I could play dumb and say I can't read and/or speak Chinese, I got in the VIP line while Aaron stayed in the normal line. No questions were asked from the lady behind the counter. She booked the tickets I needed, and we were out of the train station within 15 minutes.

Lessons learned:

- status is a big deal in China.

- Though sometimes it is not awesome to have so much attention drawn to you as a foreigner, other times it really pays off.

- try not to travel by train mid-late August, unless you want to "accidentally" get stuck somewhere.

And pictures from hanging out with friends: