Ordinarily, flight delays are a drag and a frustration. Today they saved my butt. While leaving Wuhan from a very touching grad ceremony at the former school I taught at, I made a run for the airport the next morning to head back for Shanghai. You'd think that Sunday morning would be relatively traffic free, but this is Wuhan we're talking about here.
I've probably mentioned it before in past blogs, but the school I used to teach at is really far from the airport. It is located deep in the Wuchang side of the river. In general, Wuhan consists of two major buroughs, which are Wuchang and Hankou (that's where the name Wuhan comes from) on each side of the Yangzte River.
In a worse case scenario, it would be fair to expect 5 hours to reach the airport. Ordinarily, you should give yourself 3 hours for that. Given that in mind, I decided to stay on the Hankou side of the river, but I still nearly missed my flight this morning. It took 2 hours from my hotel room, leaving around 11am on a Sunday morning. Tack on the 2 hours it took the day before to cross over from Wuchang to Hankou and it was a total of 4 hours. Rather dismal, made even worse by the fact that everybody just accepts the terrible traffic as a normality, and is comfortable with the gridlock. A key reason why I'm glad to have left that city for good now.
So you can imagine the suspense and the frustation of just sitting in a taxi and knowing that I was gonna miss my flight. Feeling defeated, par for the course in Wuhan, I trudged up to the airport counter and explained that I was caught in a traffic jam, missed the flight, and asked for suggestions on what to do next.
Well the clerk smiled and said the flight was delayed to 2pm. Wowsers, talk about good luck!!!
The rest went smoothly, and that was that. This now holds up my near-perfect record of never having missed a flight at the airport.
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