We have been blessed with an amazing team from Hebrew University that has been “pimping our ****” so to speak. They have marketed this Once in a Lifetime Experience so well that we have ended up in countless newspapers and on television all over the country.
This week I spanned the world, getting published in both Michigan and in Israel. Woohoo!!!
Enjoy the reading!
Saginaw News story can be read here
Jerusalem Post here
In the good spirit of the great business of blogging, we’ve decided to do intros for each other on our own blogs. Today, I give you the pleasure of meeting one of my roommates and fellow bloggers here in Jerusalem, Chas Newkey-Burden. Chas has a blog called www.oyvagoy.com that is wildly popular in Britain and Israel. Apparantly, I’ve developed a reputation among his followers as the “American with Australian humor…” I’ll run with it.
Without further adieu, Chas Newkey-Burden!
I am writing this post for one important reason: because there is no searchable english literature on the web that has one very important point of information you most know if you are traveling by train in mainland China to Hong Kong. So I decided to be the good samaritan to provide that information. Or maybe I am just venting from the frustration of missing my train last week and dealing with the often times ridiculous Chinese system.
Yesterday I had to catch a train at the Shanghai station to Kowloon (in HK) at 6:24. I had many things to do and people to see so time was tight, however, I managed to get to the gate with 15 minutes to spare. Judging from previous experiences in China, like last year in Beijing when Dan and I got to the gate with less than 30 seconds and hopped on our train to Qingdao as the doors were closing, I thought that 15 minutes was more than enough. Wrong — as I gave my ticket to the guard at the gate he just looked at it and said a few things in Chinese I did not understand and then said go right.
After walking out of the waiting lounge and to the right to find nothing and just signs to lead me back to the original gate, I went back and told the guy I think I’m in the right place. He mentioned the same thing in Chinese that I did not understand before, ‘gai qian’, and then said the dreaded words ‘ni yijing laibuji’ (you are too late). At that point it came to me, ‘gai zhang’ means stamp ‘qian zheng’ means visa, dammit! I have to get my visa stamped here before I go to Hong Kong, and no longer have enough time to do that and make my train.
So change of plans I go to the ticket office, wait in a 30 minute line to exchange my ticket. Too bad they are sold out for 3 weeks! Now I have to go in another line to get a refund, but they refuse to give me more than 80% of my money back. This makes me really mad so I basically argue with them for 20 minutes while there are 50 people waiting in line behind trying to explain in Chinese that there is no way I should have been expected to know that visa stamping happens strangely in the departure country and not the destination country and therefore its not my fault I missed my train its yours for not telling me your strange rules.
This did not work, but I believe I made enough trouble for to add to the incentives for them to either change their policy or start telling people at the point of buying tickets that they must come early for visa/customs issues. But until then I want everyone who is curious enough to search for this information to know: when traveling by train from mainland China to Hong Kong (Kowloon Station) you oddly must get you passports stamped at the departure station, so arrive at least 3o minutes early. The stamping station is not connected to the train entrance gate, it is entirely separate so get ready to ask people where to “gai qian”.
So the Once in A Lifetime Crew is pretty baller, and is logging our trips through some pretty baller videos. Enjoy:
