Asian Chaos

Imagine that all of America only had two weeks a year to go on vacation. Chaos, right? Now imagine instead of Americans they are millions of Chinese people. Asian chaos! Chinese National Day (their independence day) is upon us which mean that the entire country has a week off at the same time. Since people rarely take time off of work to go on vacation it is one of two times a year when people actually get out of the house and travel.

This meant that instead of my usually hour and a half bus ride to church it took me over two hours. The bus was delayed 15 minutes getting out of the station, there was a traffic jam caused by hundreds of people crowded around who knows what, and the bus took some random way to get to Suzhou. When I arrived we were dropped off in the middle of the bus parking lot, I had to push my way through a pack room of people to try to get to the nearest exit (my concert training kicked in at that point and I went into crowd maneuvering mode), which by the way was bolted closed. I'm sure there was a fire code or two that was being broken. Then I got lost inside the station for 15 minutes trying to find my way to a taxi. Fortunately, I was only 30 min late for church.

After church I took a taxi to a different bus station to get a ticket back home and found another massive crowd of people waiting to go to their various locations. Luckily I was able to make it back to church and a father and son from the branch helped me get a ticket back to my town... for the following morning. The Hiatts in my branch offered to let me stay the night with them, incidentally they live at the house where we hold church.  I am so blessed to have such great people in my branch who made sure that I had a place to stay for the night. It was an eventful day.

Now I know why I was warned to go out.