The Commute from Hell

After I had finally started my classes here in Guangzhou I ran into a big problem. The school here has at least three different campuses spread out around the whole city. One campus is in a fairly downtown part of the city, this was the original campus but the city kept taking more and more of the land so they got squeezed out. The next campus, where I was living, was in the North-East of the city, it would basically be considered a suburb in the US. This campus wasn't right on a subway line, though an expansion in two years will go right by there. The area was nice, it was fairly urban with a big shopping area just outside the gate but still less crowded then the main city. Right behind the building I was living in was a small green mountain and a little lake. The school also had one more campus in the South-East of the city, on an island called the Higher Education Mega Center. This whole island was basically just different universities. Guangzhou University, a higher ranked school has a huge campus there, as does Sun Yat-sen University, one of the top schools in all of China. Guangdong University of Technology, my school, had been moving more and more of its operations to this island for years, and nearly 80% of the school was now there.

The problem was almost all my classes were there as well. I had heard that there was some possibility of a commute, with only 12 hours of classes it didn't sound so bad, but for many of the other teachers who lived in the North and taught at the Higher Education Mega Center campus the school arranged a car to drive them two and from. Because my classes took so long to start, and since I was the only one teaching there in the evening, this wasn't possible for me. Instead I had to take public transportation both ways. To begin with I had to walk to the bus stop, about a 10-15 minute walk from my apartment. Then I'd get on a bus for about nine stops until I finally got to the subway. There I had to transfer twice and go about 18 stops until I finally reached the Higher Education Mega Center stop, there were actually two stops on the island. Then it was another 10 minute walk to class. The whole thing took between 90 and 100 minutes each way. So I ended up spending more than 3 hours commuting some days.

What was worse is that on Monday and Tuesday I only had one class. So I had to commute for three hours for 90 minutes of actual class time. This basically turned my light schedule into annoying slog. I was furious at the school the first time I realized exactly how far I had to go for such a little amount of teaching. It also made it really difficult to care about the classes since I was pissed at the school every time I stepped off the metro. It was just the usual Chinese way of turning what should be something really easy into something monumentally difficult. It also didn't help that riding the subway with Chinese people is infuriating. Everyone tries to get on and off the car at the same moment, though it is sometimes satisfying to knock people out of my way when I'm getting off, and no one moves away from the door making the whole thing one big clusterfuck. At least I was usually going at off-peak hours so it wasn't as crowded as it could be.