Subway Adventure

After returning to the hotel, we successfully remedied the swim cap issue. This took visits to several stores and some skillful acting by Monica - think 'swimming' in a game of charades. I will note that Monica's Chinese is getting pretty good and lots of people understood her rendition of 'do you speak english?' At least well enough to shake their heads emphatically 'no'. We have discovered, of course, that many people do understand and speak some english and are just shy about using it, however will try some if you stick with it long enough. Their english is certainly better than my Chinese!

Monica and I then decided to head out for a night without the kids, thinking it would be a fun adventure to ride the subway to another part of the city for dinner. We were right.

Once we had successfully located the subway (thank you very little, iPhone gps...), we descended to find 400 or 500 people jockeying for position to get through a single entry turnstile. Of course, we assumed this was normal and were soon swept up in this mass of humanity. When we realized something must be wrong, we swam back upstream and ascended to street level to look for a cab, only to discover that it was now raining and all 23 million people in Shanghai were also looking to get into a cab.

The advice from the bellman at a nearby hotel was to head back down into the subway, and so we did. The fascinating thing to me was that, even with hundreds of people literally pressed chest to back, there was a notable skill differential that allowed most Chinese people to 'swim' right by us, without being overly aggressive or pushy. I was also very impressed with how calm everyone stayed, at least until that final moment right at the single turnstile.

We did eventually make it down to the platform, where we had to push and shove our way onto the second train that came. We made it to our destination and in fact had a very uneventful subway ride back later that night.

As it turns out, there was a problem with the trains and the single turnstile strategy was the subway authorities' way of preventing the platform from overloading, which made good sense. So the situation was not normal, and our first experience was a good confidence builder for future train rides on this trip.