Night of Adventure

So we experienced our first adventure in China trying to catch our train from Beijing to Xian. (Btw, I'm really behind on these blogs, we're 4 days into our Xian trip currently) So as strong J's, Jasper and I planned out our time carefully. We did some work at a cafe the whole afternoon, and left just enough time to get to the train station (the correct one, presumably) 20 minutes early. perfect! However, as we got off at our subway stop walking towards Beijing train station, I took out the ticket and noticed that on the ticket it said 北京西站，which is Beijing West Train Station. Although I knew that there were two train stations namely Beijing Train Station and Beijing West Train Station, we somehow just assumed that our train tickets were for the main station. Basically it was totally our fault. So we absolutely rushed (like full on sprint) to make it to the other train station which is all the way on the other side of Beijing, notice below:
Although it looks close, it's basically on the other side of the city. As we got off of the right subway stop, we took a taxi to the train station since it's a bit of a walk from the subway station. We then proceeded to sprint around the entire train station trying to find where we were supposed to go. One we found out and got to the gate, it was like chariots of fire to the train gate. The train left at 6:58. We got there at 6:55 for the ticket officer to tell us that we were too late.

Uh oh, not good. The next morning we had an important appointment with George Hu in Xian, and he was coming to pick us up. So we needed to contact him. At the same time my family in Shanghai is worried about us, trying to contact us.

Then...Jasper realizes that he's lost his phone. He left it in the taxi on the way there. hurting! okay, at least we have my phone, i thought. I then realize that my phone is out of battery. Hurting! So we go around trying to find an outlet, none to be found. We finally find one and we plug in our phone, just long enough for a one of the worker ladies to come and shoo us away. Apparently, you can't use the outlets for free in China. But after some haggling (begging) she let us use the outlet. Eventually we contacted George, bought tickets for the next train, and was on our way. I feel like I burned three days' worth of calories in that two hour period.