25 February 2006
A travel writer's nightmares
1. I urgently needed to board a train to get to an appointment in London. The train was very long but a vast crowd of others were also trying to board. It was halted on a vast loop of track and we hurried alongside it towards the rear looking through the windows and trying to find a door that wan't already like a rugby scrum. As I got near the end the train moved off and rapidly pulled out of the station, the guard at the rear smiling and waving.
2. I was in a hotel (that looked like a composite of various Shangri-La properties I've stayed in) and I needed to get back to my room from the lobby in a hurry to get ready to meet someone. The left took a very long time to come. When it did I rushed in, and while I turned to look for the button for my floor it moved off. I couldn't remember if I was on 7 or 8 and the card-key had no number on it so I decided (why?) to try 8, but this was an express lift with its first stop at 10. I got out there, and waited a long time and with increasing anxiety for a descending lift. This dropped me at 8, which turned out to be a large restaurant area where the staff were clearing up after breakfast. I looked for stairs to travel one floor down and became lost in the labyrinth of the 8th.
3. I was in a line-up to buy a ticket to enter a museum in Bangkok (I felt it to be Bangkok, but this was some ultra-modern place) where I needed to do a quick tour in a hurry for a guide book to check if anything had changed since my last visit. There were large numbers of Hong Kongers who were behaving like mainland Chinese and constantly pushing their way to the front. Finally I fought my own way there, and asked for one ticket, and handed over a green note which seemed to give the woman who took it some surprise. She asked me to wait, and disappeared for a long time. When she finally came back she gave me change and the ticket, and I pushed my way out of the surrounding mob, only to notice that the change was not in Thai baht, but in Hong Kong dollars. When I looked in my wallet I found that all my money was in Hong Kong dollars, and I began to think I'd been short-changed. I didn't have any other green notes and I was trying to work out what value the green-coloured note has in Hong Kong, and then starting to think I'd actually given her a brown note (which would be HK$500 I remembered) and which would mean I definitely had been short-changed by HK$400. The mob around the counter was thick, the clock was ticking, and I stood in frustration and indecision...
4. I ran out of the museum and jumped on a London-style bus at random, while asking myself what the hell I was doing. I wanted to get to the main railway station (I had Beijing West in mind rather than Hualamphong, although I thought I was still in Bangkok). I sat for several stops fretting about whether it was going where I wanted to go and realising that I'd absolutely no idea where I was. Suddenly some stranger started to tell me his life story, and when after a long time I managed to interrupt him, he didn't know where he was either. The bus began to wind up through rather English-looking narrow lanes and on a road that looked like the one that runs across the top of Hampstead Heath while I became more and more worried that I was going to miss my train.
This is what having too many deadlines at one time can apparently do to you. My back, knee, and shoulders ache from too much sitting, and I can't sleep.
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