Remember what I said yesterday? Yeah, nevermind.

Apparently the level of confidence I exhibited in my last post was deemed unacceptable by the gods, who took it upon themselves today to put me in my rightful place. I have been thoroughly humbled.

As you may know, I'm supposed to be on a train to Amritsar right now. Let me tell you the story of why I'm not.

Our train was scheduled to leave the station at 2:40, so Jordan and I planned to meet for lunch after my class and then head to the train station. I ended up getting delayed at school because I needed to talk to the professor, and I was 25 minutes late. This was still ok, though - we'd have to eat fast, and we wouldn't have the same healthy margin of time to figure out where to go, but we'd be able to make it. So we got our food and ate it fast, but about 5 minutes before we left the restaurant, it started pouring rain. And when I say pouring, I mean buckets - India means serious business when it rains. We hailed an auto rickshaw to take us the short distance to the train station, to save time and to hopefully not get as wet. The auto crawled through the rain along the street, which was in an extreme state of disrepair, until we were close enough to see cars going by on the street that the train station was on. At this point, our driver got a phone call, told us "ek (one) minute," then got out of the auto to talk to some guys in a shop. We sat there wondering what was going on, but figured we might as well just wait. After a minute, he came back and started up the auto again. But instead of driving the short distance to the train station, he turned around and started driving back the way we came. We said, "where are you going? We're running late for our train," to which he simply replied, "ek minute." He drove us back practically half the distance we'd already come, then stopped and delivered a package to some guy. Then he sat there while that guy made a phone call. At this point we were practically yelling at our driver, "We need to go! We're going to miss our train!" When he failed to respond to this, Jordan and I hopped out of the auto and into the rain.

We ran through the pouring rain, through ankle-deep puddles of a mud, garbage and excrement slurry, as we tried to make it to the train on time. When we got to the station, soaked and disheveled, it stopped raining almost immediately. Someone who worked there called out to us from the crush of people and asked to see our ticket. He told us to go to platform 3 for our train, like it said on the electronic board. We looked at the board, and didn't see our train anywhere on it, but when we tried to tell him that, he just rushed us along and pointed us up the stairs. On the overpass that led to all the train platforms, we scanned the electronic signs to look for our train. We saw that the train at platform 3 was definitely not the one we wanted, but just at that moment, a voice on the loudspeaker informed us that the Amritsar Express train was pulling in to platform 5. I was a bit hesitant, since it didn't have the same train number as the number on our ticket, but it had the same name, destination, and departure time as the one on our ticket, so we decided to head down to platform 5. Once there, I showed my ticket to a random stranger and asked him if I was in the right place - he said yes. Uncertain, I asked one of the uniformed guards who worked at the station, and he told me the same thing. We looked everywhere for some sort of official whose job it was to tell us where to go, but we didn't find anyone.

So, we figured we must be in the right place, boarded the train, and walked down the length of it, car after car, trying to find our coach. We walked all the way down to the end without finding it, and asked the family who invited us to sit with them if they knew where the sleeper coach was. They told us it was down all the way at the front end of the train, so we set off again, walking the entire length of the train, down a narrow aisle that was becoming increasingly jammed with people and their baggage. When we got all the way to the front of the train without finding our seats, we went out and asked another uniformed guard. He told us that this wasn't our train - our train was on platform 9 - so we dashed up the stairs and over to the platform, only to find it empty; the train was gone.

Just then, an announcement came over the loudspeaker that the train to Amritsar at platform 5 was about to leave. We ran back and tried to find a spot on the train, figuring that it could still be our train after all. We managed to find a ticket examiner, finally, and asked him where we were supposed to go. He told us that we weren't on the right train, and that we had missed ours after all. We tried to ask him what we should do, how we could get a ticket for this train, but he walked away from us and refused to answer our questions. A nice local man took pity on us and communicated with the ticket examiner (who spoke perfectly fine English, as it is a requirement for his job) who was refusing to speak to us. He told us some very confusing information: first that we could buy a ticket, then that we couldn't because it was too late, and if we stayed on, we would have to pay a fine that was double what the tickets cost us. Plus we figured that if we were fined for traveling without a ticket, we probably wouldn't be allowed to stay on for the entire duration of our trip, and would be kicked out at the next stop. So, we hung our heads and left the train, dejected, still soaking wet, and covered in foul-smelling mud.

So yeah, like I said. Thoroughly humbled.