Chinatown Bus

One of the extraordinary properties of America is its capacity to generate successful entrepreneurs out of humble foreign immigrants. The most striking example for me lies in the Chinatown-Chinatown bus services. Here on the East coast, there are at least a dozen rival bus services that depart and arrive daily in downtown Chinatowns between Boston, New York, Philadelphia, DC and they have plans to extend further south. To top it all off their prices are dirt cheap and buses run very reliably - in some cases, out-competing the traditional cross-country Greyhound coaches and the over-priced Amtrak train monopoly. I travel on one of these coaches (New Century - and possibly the most popularized) every two weeks to visit my mum in DC.

It is worth it for the convenience, the money you save and the greeness. Yes it's cheap because it only costs $28 return for a roundtrip. Yes, it's green because you are not pumping gas into your own car to drive three hundred miles. The Asian drivers are always pretty much on time and are familiar with the route. Occasionally the driver even tries to do some live sight-seeing commentary on warm, pleasant summer days.

Unfortunately, word of the cheap-ass Chinatown bus has spread like wild-fire in the last decade and its popularity has soared so high it now attracts too many customers. A lot of the time the coaches are over-subscribed, especially on busy Sunday afternoons and if you get there ten minutes before the bus leaves, you WON'T get a seat. Scrambling on this bus to grab a seat can be disorderly at best. I'm often reminded of the scene from Babylon A.D. when Vin Diesel and Michelle Yeoh desperately chase for a space on an illegal Russian submarine, with hundreds of other desperate refugees fleeing a nuclear disaster, only to be shot at and pushed off into the frozen ice. That's the feeling you get if you arrive just a few minutes too late and the full coach is about to leave before you even figured out it was supposed to go to Philly, not New York - then you'd have to wait another 4 hours in the cold for the next one! It's sometimes hard to decipher where and when the next bus is departing when the driver and ticket sales women speak to you through their broken Chinglish. Obviously once you do get on, you have to sacrifice the comfort and space that you may have in your own car by squashing yourself in a seat with a stranger next to you for 3 hours + and suffer occasional bad smells from the only available public restroom at the back of the vehicle.

However, despite all that, if you don't have a car, don't plan to spend money on fuel and are a skint student/academic, this is THE way to travel between the big cities on the East coast.

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This week, Lost in Americana watched another graduate student at the university defend his thesis in front of his relentlessly demanding thesis committee - one that has been mentioned before, renowned for their over-ambitious snarling, even derogatory questions. My god, these professors are unreasonable! Lucky for him, that graduate student has already done some pretty smart work, has a list of good publications to back himself up and an intimate knowledge of how to rebuff the attacks. Lost in Americana looks forward to the day he will also be punished (again) in front of the high and mighty thesis committee members when he gives his postdoc seminar before leaving the bloody place!