Orangized Chaos

What was supposed to be a relatively quick 30 minute drive from our office to the head office (for training week) turned into an unexpected tour of the city of Shanghai. Warning: this is long.

I woke up at the early hour of about 6AM to the sound of thunder. I peeked out the room window but saw no rain, but there was no mistake for that rumbling sound in the sky. Before I knew it, it was raining like no other. As a purebred SoCal girl, any form of precipitation falling from the sky is enough cause for excitement. But here was window-rattling thunder and pouring rain. It was like God suddenly decided to empty his bottomless pool over onto the city of Shanghai. I tried going back to sleep but the sound was too much for me so I woke up and went online for about an hour or so. Finally deciding that I would need all my energy for the full day of training, I tried to go back to sleep and was able to get maybe all of a 10 minute extra sleep.

Lisa (who pretty much slept through the whole morning) and I woke up to get dressed to go to the office to meet our driver. We braved the streets of backed up, non-moving cars for the short walk from hotel to office. When we arrived, the only people in the hallway was a Chinese guy and Ryan. Turned out that no one else had made it in on time. We wait around for awhile, standing near a window for ventilation when an office worker arrived, recognized Lisa and we went in to wait in the waiting room. We were supposed to leave the office at 10am to make the 11am training sessions. Our driver calls and informs the office that he was going to be running late because of the traffic. Not a problem, so the three of us went down to the convenience store to pick up some breakfast and snacks.

Driver arrives at 12noon. Actually, driver calls office to have them bring us down to the street corner to meet him since it would take too long to turn into the drive way and come back out. Office Man takes us down, tells us to wait at the street corner, and that he was going to run back to the office to grab his cell phone. We wait and the driver shows up. He shouts out the window to get our attention and we quickly ran through the rain to the door. We move halfway down the block and Driver gets a phone call from Office Man who says that he was to come with us to the office. It’s not like we moved far down the street so Office Man runs into the crowded street to search for us.

Keep in mind for the rest of this blog that the streets are filled with cars. x1000. Two lane streets turned into a random jumble of 7 “lanes”. Cars started to drive in the direction of opposing traffic and even on the sidewalks. If there was a sudden empty space you can bet that some car will find its way into that spot within seconds. There was complete disregard for the street lights and all laws of driving safety. There are really no words to describe it. You had to see it. But there were no accidents and no cars were bumping into each other. It was pure organized chaos.

We are driving ever so slowly. We were once stopped at an intersection for so long that we were debating whether to get out of the car and grab some lunch. Right on the corner was some sort of food place. We literally had enough time to get out, order our food, eat our food and get back into the car. And the car MIGHT have moved one foot.

The car ride was getting boring since we would stare at the same scenery for a long time. The endless car honking was getting annoying and we wanted to sleep. That was when things started to get interesting. We see a group of men standing outside of their cars yelling at each other. Fight! It would have been so cool if they started punching each other, but that didn’t happen. The cars didn’t even hit. They were just yelling at each other. Our driver used that to his advantage because he followed the car into the opening that it had created and we were able to turn onto the next street.

Circa 2pm (you do the math) we started seeing a lot more water on the ground. As we continued driving, the water level rose higher and higher on the sides of the roads. Pretty soon we saw that some of the streets were flooded. The motorbike lane (kinda like the bike lanes in America, but a separate area on the street barred off for motorbikes) was flooding. In some parts it had raised to the level of the sidewalk. Some brave walkers were trudging through it and it was up the their shins. Driver tells Office Man that we should get out and take the metro since we were near one of the stations by now. 2 hours to drive about 10 blocks!


So glad that I know Mandarin because it made the whole sudden change of plans a lot smoother. We got out of the car in the middle of traffic and had to cross a flooded street. Ryan was able to jump over it and Lisa had boots on but I had flip flops on because of my bum feet. So Ryan was trying to help me across but I’m not tall enough to jump when Office Man finally pointed out a shallow area. Office Man led the way and kept nervously glancing back to make sure that the three of us were keeping up. I bet he didn’t want to lose the three American teachers he was responsible for. The three of us had no clue how to navigate the metro so we just followed Office Man and he would speak to me in Mandarin and I would translate for Ryan and Lisa. I think that put a lot of people at ease because there was effective communication. While on the Metro, Lisa and I would watch each other’s bags since we were facing each other and couldn’t see behind us. We just kept following Office Man through the maze and crowd of people to another Metro line, got off, walked a few blocks through Shanghai and then finally arrived at the head office. At 3:30pm.


Office Man dropped us off and then disappeared. He told me to call Mr. Lu when we were done and “he would take care of how we would get home.” They were already wrapping things up so we got maybe about 30 mins of training. We finally saw Karol and she was questioning why we were so late. So Lisa, Ryan and I stayed behind for a bit to get a quick crash course of what they went over that day. Driver and the office call us to let us know that Driver had finally made it to the head office and was waiting downstairs. He basically spent the whole day driving to and from head office. There was no abnormal traffic on the way back to our district (Minhang) and all the flood water had disappeared. Driver dropped us off on the corner of the office and said he would meet us at 10:30am the next morning to take us back.

Lisa, Ryan and I got out of the van and immediately wanted to get some food. We had not eaten the whole day except for the little bit of breakfast snacks we had managed to buy before leaving our office. We walked down the street and stopped at the first place we saw (and felt safe eating). We were looking at the menu outside trying to figure out whether we would eat anything there when we realized that we were so hungry that we didn’t really care anymore. As we walked in I saw that it was a restaurant with a Tainan theme (which means it was Taiwanese style) so I figured that I would be able to find something to eat. It wasn’t really Taiwanese style, it was more a mixture of just Chinese food. Which was good because there was more variety. Best part? They are open 24 hours. I guess we found our Chinese Denny's restaurant. And it’s pretty cheap, too.

It’s only about 8:30pm but all of us are so exhausted for a day where we spent sitting in a car all day with a brief walk through the Metro and Shanghai. Great team work today team with not losing each other. And especially appreciative of our awesome Driver and Office Man who were so determined to get us to head office. Especially Driver with his mad driving skills.