Chinatown bus, Boston to New York, a year ago to the day

It's been 7 months since I've been back in Edinburgh, and 8 since I posted anything on this blog. But yesterday, as I was walking back from the lab, I got thinking about how exactly a year ago (to the hour, accounting for the time zone difference) I had been boarding a chinatown bus to get from Boston to New York.

I'd heard about the Fung Wah bus (one of the chinatown bus companies - i.e buses that ran between the chinatowns of the US east coast). Business school case studies have been done on this low-cost barebones model and I'd heard and read horror stories of how drivers were sometimes rude, and passengers were sometimes even left stranded by the highway if something happened to the bus.

But things had changed, they now ran from the Boston bus terminal rather than picking up passengers from the side of a main road, offered online ticketing and even wifi on board. Still, I was prepared for the worst, but ended up travelling very comfortably in only 4 hours to New York for $15 (I got to the station and there was a bus about to leave - it wasn't Fung Wah, but Lucky Star, and ticketing/boarding was super efficient - it took only 3 minutes from the time I spotted the bus company's desk to the moment that the bus pulled out of its bay).

In New York City, the bus lived up to its name and dropped passengers in chinatown rather than at the official bus station, and it was fun to walk past the brightly lit streets and stalls selling Chinese food. Interestingly, a lot of the shops selling bags and clothes seemed to be run by Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis. Odd.