Tuesday, July 7, 2015

My First MRT Breakdown Experience


Finally received my pay today, hence I decided to treat my mum to good food.

Before that, my mum and I went to Thien Hock Keng to say my prayers to Confucius, hoping to bring some luck for my education in the near future. Had Apple, Beetroot and Carrot (ABC) Juice at Amoy Street market, I swear their prices are real cheap as compared to the ones that I had before???

Moved on to town and shopped around before we had our dinner at Imperial Treasure @ Ngee Ann City.

It was around 7:48 pm when we reached Orchard MRT Station, but was shocked to hear the announcement regarding the train fault/breakdown.

I was like "WTH?". My mum and I thought that we heard it wrongly hence we waited for another 5-10 mins for the repeated announcement. Lol, indeed there was no train service for BOTH red and green line. What luck yeah.

We tried to find the nearest bus stop; I thought the bus stop that I had in mind with buses 190 and 700 to Bukit Panjang will be less crowded BUT I was wrong.

Look at this. The amount of people couldn't even fit along the bus stop.

I wanted to hang around, hoping that the lines will be alright in a while (stupid me, since when train breakdowns are solved within an hour), so we walked around a bit and sat down at the fountain at Takashimaya.

After around 15 minutes, we decided to walk towards Dhoby Gaut, hoping that we can get on some bus before the rest of the people in town. Walked all the way to the bus stop right outside Dhoby MRT Station and was so lucky to be able to get on bus 700A despite the scary crowd. We managed to find seats too.

Then I received a text message from my dad saying that he was stuck at Bugis as well. I was pretty worried for him because there weren't many buses available to our destinations and he said that every bus passed by without stopping due to full capacity.

It then daunt on me that, what if this isn't just a normal train fault? What if it was a natural disaster and we are all separated? (I know my powderful brain cannot stop over-thinking) I can't help worrying and thinking of all sorts of possible routes for him to get home.

But that was not the end. We alighted opposite Pending LRT Station and woah, here comes another crowd. But luckily, Two bus 963 arrived . My mum was so 小姐 she actually wanted to give up squeezing and wait for the next one. But having been a part of the workforce recently, I found the tactic to squeeze in and I dragged my mother onto the bus no matter how reluctant she was. Because at this rate, the longer you wait, the larger the crowd gets. As we stopped at each bus stop, the squeezing gets more intense; more and more people start to squeeze on the bus till the point that the door can't even close. We actually had to ask this Indian guy to get off because we had to close the door otherwise the bus could not move. I felt soooo bad for him; he willingly got off the bus without a look of anger or frustration.

So before we reached our destination, I was telling my mum about my brilliant plan about which shuttle buses to take and where to stand so we can avoid the crowd, but HAHA I was wrong. All wrong. At each booth, there was a huge crowd, even for those buses that were just circulating around my area. We gave up and decided to walk home.

So this is how I ended my eventful day. I wrote this post not because I was excited about the breakdown, but I felt like it was something happening in my recent mundane life HAHAHA. Okay off to sleep now, there's work tomorrow sobs.

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