Adventures in Chinatown

So on a whim I decided I would head up to NYC for the three day weekend. However, this is not a cheap undertaking. That is, unless, you take the chinatown bus. For $35.00 (round trip!) you can ride a crappy, smelly bus for five hours that picks you up in Chinatown of DC and drops you in the middle of Chinatown in NYC. So I got home from work, packed up a bag, made plans to meet a friend in NYC, and made my way down to Chinatown.

When I got to the station they operate out of, it was everything I thought it would be. A small non-air conditioned room that sells tickets. To make matters worse it was a muggy, rainy day so the room was crowded with a couple dozen people ranging from college students to flat out sketch-balls. And B.O. was in play too.

Unfortunately the 5:00 bus was sold out but the guy told me I could wait and get an extra seat if there was one. So the 5:00 bus shows up at 4:30 and starts loading people up. I ended up missing a seat by about three people. But the bus left at 4:40! WTF!? So of course, over the next twenty minutes, people that were on that 5:00 bus came streaming in and found out that the bus took off early. Ha! Obviously overbooking is a policy of the Chinatown bus.

There was another bus at 6:00 that I decided to stick around for. So this time I went and waited outside where we would board the bus when it arrived. There were a lot of people doing this at this point because they didn't want to miss another bus. 6:00 came and went, no bus. 6:30, no bus. Finally at 7:00 and still no bus, I decided I had had enough and left. My ticket is good anytime I want to use it over the next year, so I'll just hold onto it.

What a Mickey Mouse operation. I seriously cannot wait to ride this thing to New York. Maybe next weekend.