I've known Peter Wang since the incident with the little lost puppy Rose. Oddly enough, she was the one who introduced him to me. At the time he was living in the same building as her and they'd met in the elevator. He wasn't able to provide much help with her situation but he was part of the crowd of people who rallied around to try and we sort of became friends afterwards.

"Little lost puppies" aren't actually dogs. They're people. Specifically, foreigners. Foreigners who are having a really bad time of everything and who just can't cope with China. Maybe because China is being particularly egregiously bad to them but, just as often, because they take a spoon fed solution to their problem and spit it out.

Rose was not kind of puppy who grows up to become a wolf. She was the kind who buys a plane ticket in the middle of the night and runs away while still owed thousands of dollars.

Peter moved to Chongqing two or three years ago and I've not seen him since. I wasn't quite willing to bike into a megacity to go see him but, especially with the addition of Tyra using his address to mail me cookies, more almond powder, a bunch of cheese, and a lovingly stolen spoon from my favorite restaurant, there was enough of an impetus to take the train from Hechuan and go to meet him for lunch.

Except that when I got to Hechuan Station, all the train tickets were sold out.

I'm not sure if all trains have resumed service but no Chinese trains are selling standing room tickets right now. That's as much as a third of the volume of ticket sales on some trains. But I'm so accustomed to the really bad habit of just rocking on up to the train station and getting a ticket whenever I get there that I didn't buy in advance and now there were no seats.

So I had to get a taxi from the train station to the coach station, and then, after waiting for nearly an hour, take an 80 minute bus to Chongqing.

Peter, being a sweetheart, didn't make me suffer any more transit after that point and met me at the coach station and took me to a restaurant around the corner from there.

The coach back didn't involve quite so much waiting around at the station but it was a substantially worse for the wear vehicle that also ended up being completely full.

It was a long long day.

And if my hotel had had a washing machine available such that doing my laundry and hanging it to dry were an option, I totally would have used recuperating from this day as an excuse to go visit stuff in and around Hechuan.