There are lots of reasons why living on an island is nice: The feeling of openness and space that comes with looking at water, access to a beach, drinks with little umbrellas, boat trips… But there is also one big disadvantage to living on an island: Getting off is not so easy.
The other day I was heading out of town to visit a friend. As trains are stupidly expensive, I’d booked a bus at 2.30pm thinking that this should be ahead of rush hour… turns out, I was wrong.
The bus station is located one block away from one of the bridges that leads off Manhattan; taking the onramp into account, it’s about a kilometre until you are on the bridge. The bus set off bang on time at 2.30pm. By 3pm we had gotten this far:
45mins later, at 3.45pm we had moved no further.
In the end, it took us 1.39h to move the kilometre from the bus station onto the bridge… and this was setting off at 2.30pm. Now just imagine how long it must have taken people working until 5pm to leave the island and get home…
As I sat on the bus and looked out of the window at the people stretching their legs, wondering whether one could order a pizza to be delivered to the bus (in NY, the answer is probably yes), my mind drifted back to a similar experience five years ago in South Africa:
A friend and I had decided to spend a weekend in Durban and rather than drive or fly there, take the overnight train. I’d taken it before and knew that it was surprisingly comfortable, food was good and the journey overall quite pleasant.
We boarded the train, settled into our compartment and went to the lounge for a drink before dinner. The train started to move... and then stopped again. We were happily chatting, enjoying a glass of wine and playing some Yatzee, so we didn’t really notice how long the train was standing for. Two hours and an empty bottle of wine later, we realised that in all this time we had hardly moved at all and were now all of 2kilometres away from the Johannesburg station. It would have taken us 25mins to walk the same distance.
But if there is one thing that Africa teaches you, it is to wait and be patient. There was a nice big screen TV in the lounge and so we decided to watch a movie to kill some time. We were struggling with the TV sound when a friendly member of staff walked by and offered his help. Turns out, a cable was missing so he kindly went to get it for us. After a few minutes, he came back with the cable, which wasn’t the right one, so he went to find another one.
Feeling rather chuffed by this excellent service, we had just opened another bottle of wine when the train manager made an announcement: There was an electrical problem with the train and they were waiting for the electrician to come and fix it. He was, the manager said, already on board, but delayed getting to them.
My friend and I looked at each other with big eyes and confused faces: Could it be that the friendly gentlemen who was so kindly helping us with our entertainment issue, was the same gentlemen who the entire train was waiting for…? We never found out.
 |
| Durban was worth going to though :) |
No comments:
Post a Comment