A typhoon, universal gratitude and a somewhat lost me.

I have watched enough movies to know that the slightest of hunch about a thing going awry, particularly when related to death by accidents, comes true. So, it was obvious when I heard about a typhoon in Hong Kong, I wanted to reschedule my flight. But such convenience was not to come my way, perhaps the universe wanted me to become more resilient, withstand higher degrees of turbulence, or just simply perish. As the hope of traveling on another date due to closure of reservation office dwindled, paranoia escalated. I battled that by promptly sleeping for three quarters of the flying time. The captain assured us of a bumpy albeit safe journey. But bless the man for he landed us amidst torrential rain and heavy storm cloud cover onto a runway that materialized out of the choppy seas all too suddenly but at the right moment. The landing alleviated my impending sense of doom which had resurrected itself as I had come back to consciousness after the slumber. Now all I needed to do was to eat an overpriced meal at the airport, buy a bus ticket and be off on the last leg of the journey.

Things however did not materialize as I had so brilliantly planned. The bus services had been cancelled, the tropical storm warning had reached 8, and If I didn’t hurry the trains too would be overcome by inertia and wouldn’t budge from Hong Kong. I hurried to get a taxi, as luck would have it, the guy knew only two words in English, thankfully one of them was ‘Danger’ , so I knew exactly how to feel on the ride to the train station. The rain swirled all around, and the taxi swayed sideways, which was the drivers cue to blurt out the word danger repeatedly. Even though the bridges were off limits, half the roads inaccessible, and my mind was running amok with huge tsunami like waves crashing on top of the taxi, I reached the station in time to catch the afternoon train to Guangzhou. But I wish the transition from the taxi to the train seat was as effortlessly brought out as the last sentence. When you add a person with my gait, and four pieces of luggage weighing more than me to the equation, the result is, well, nothing short of a miracle.

So I’d like to thank the man who helped me load on the luggage onto the X-ray machine, the people behind me who didn’t squirm or push when they crawled behind me as I struggled to maintain balance, walk, and push giant pieces of luggage onto the escalator, and the kind, kind man who helped me put on the above mentioned luggage on to the carriers in the train, and who broke his glasses in the process. Eternal gratitude is what I feel, and perhaps this is the only way I can express it. Xie, Xie all.