The Broken CompassWhy is it that whenever you ask for directions in China, the Chinese will always give you an answer regardless of whether or not they know? They’ll point you in a direction and give you a distance, an approximate walking time, tell you how many times you have to turn and once you’ve done all this you end up no where near the place you want to go. These aren’t one off occasions either; they are frighteningly frequent. Here is an illustration:
My flatmates – Marta and Julia - and I were meeting friends for dinner in another part of town and decided to take the bus to get there. Arriving at the bus station, we saw that there were no buses going in the right direction, so we asked an elderly woman standing nearby “Excuse me, which bus goes to Chaoyang?” She stopped and looked around for a few seconds, pointed across the road and said “Go over the overpass, then take a right, walk for 5 minutes and you’ll find the bus stop.” We thanked her graciously and made our way across the bridge, down to the other side of the street and walked along to the bus stop. Upon arrival we studied the timetable and were again unable to find the right bus, so we asked a smart young man in a suit “Excuse me, which bus goes to Chaoyang?” He looked at us, then to his right, then to his left and then he looked at the board. After about 30 seconds he said “The bus doesn’t go from here, you have to cross the bridge and get it from the other side.”
“But we just came from there!” we protested “We asked a woman and she told us to come to this bus stop!”
“Sorry,” he said “it doesn’t run from here, you have to go catch it from the other side.” So cursing the old woman we crossed the bridge again and made our way back to original bus stop. Luckily for her, the old woman was already long gone. We studied the timetable again but could find nothing useful. We approached a mother with her two children; the kids stopped chatting and stared at us with fingers up their noses as we interrogated their mother. She looked around “It doesn’t run from here,”
“We have to catch it from the other side?” I interrupted. “Yes,” she said “the bus runs from the other side. Go across the bridge and walk five minutes…” It was hopeless. Trundling up the bridge again we made it to the other bus stop and, with fists clenched, I was harassing another guy while Marta got on a bus and asked the driver “Excuse me, but which bus goes to Chaoyang?”
“Oh!” said the driver “The bus stop is nowhere near here! You have to walk straight on for about 10 or 15 minutes; you’ll see a green bridge. Turn right there, then left again and there will be a bus stop. It’s the number 345.”
While Marta came to tell me the good news the man I was talking to was pointing across the road.
