Flying into Beijing

As I sit in my hotel room, watching Manchester City play Juventus at 4:00 a.m., suffering from an epic case of jetlag, I thought I might as well start the Southeast Asia leg of the blog. Of course, by the time you read this, I will be well over that because I won’t be able to post this for at least three weeks, and that’s iffy, when I get to Hong Kong. Like Facebook, Blogspot isn’t tolerated in China and I am unable to access the site to post anything, but I will when I can. (For the record, at the moment, it’s 4 a.m. on October 1 in Beijing.)

I’d tell you about Beijing, but I don’t know crap about Beijing, yet. I got here around 8:30 p.m. and went straight to bed. I haven’t even eaten in China, yet. So this isn’t about Beijing so much as it is about getting to Beijing.

If you ever look at my Facebook updates, you may recall that this trip was RDU-PHL-JFK-PEK. I got to the airport in Raleigh at around 7:15 am on Wednesday. I was a little early, as I always am when I have the time, and, as always, it was completely unnecessary in Raleigh because I was at my gate with my bags checked within ten minutes of my arrival at the airport. I did have some Starbucks for the first time since my trip to Washington almost two months ago, though, so it was worth it.

Everything from Raleigh to Philadelphia to New York was pretty painless. Everything was on time and the flights are kind of short, so there’s nothing really on which to report. At JFK, I had to check-in for the international leg of my journey. The area for this at JFK is broken into eight sections with two to twelve foreign airlines assigned to each section. Some are nearly empty, while others are in complete chaos. My airline was at Group H. Group H was complete chaos.

When I got to Group H, the first thing I noticed was about 150 people in a line that had coiled around so that it looked like a rattlesnake ready to strike. And the vast majority of them were Chinese. This didn’t bode well. As I got close enough to the counter to see what the line was for, however, I saw that it was for a flight to Shanghai on Chinese Eastern Airlines. Not my destination. Not my airline. Not my problem.

I went around the corner to the other side of Group H and I saw three people working the counters for Air China’s flight to Beijing and they were all helping the same person. And there was nobody in line. Could this be my lucky day? It was. In retrospect, it seems kind of odd because I was there less than two hours before my flight and there had to be over 400 people on the plane, but I’m not one to spit in the face of good luck, so I got checked-in and went to the gate.

The main point that I want to make about the flight from New York to Beijing is just that thirteen-and-a-half hours is too long to be on a plane. It just is. It wasn’t a bad flight. I had an aisle seat and the seat next to mine was empty, so I could spread out, and there were meals. Overall, it wasn’t bad, it was just too damn long. (Note: At the moment, I’m in Hong Kong on October 20 and I have had train rides over 24-hours. A 13-1/2 hour plane ride seems luxurious to me at this point, but I digress.)

And it wasn’t like a day with a morning, and afternoon and an evening. The trip was thirteen-and-a-half hours of late-afternoon. The plane left at 4:50 pm in New York and landed at 6:20 pm in Beijing, having passed through a dozen time zones and the international date line. So, it wasn’t like a red-eye where you could get some sleep and still wake up in the morning at least a little refreshed. There was just no good sleeping plan that made sense under any circumstances. Not that it mattered because I’ve never been able to sleep on airplanes anyway. By the time I got to Beijing, I had been up around 46 of the previous 50 hours and just wanted to get to the hotel and get some sleep.

A note about the food on Air China. We had two meals, which I suppose is a good amount for a 13.5 hour flight, but they fed us within the first two hours of the flight and the last two hours of the flight, meaning I went about ten hours with nothing, although they did stop by with tea occasionally, which was nice. And it wasn’t like the second meal was worth the wait, though I have to say that the first meal was pretty good for airline food. We had options for pork and rice or duck and rice. Duck? On an airplane? GIMME DUCK!!!! Yeah, baby, I’m on Air China.

Getting through immigration was quick and painless and then there was the obligatory one-hour wait for my bag to make it to baggage claim. I swear, every single freakin’ time!!! I made it through customs without anybody even bothering to blink at me and caught a cab to my hotel.

This first night, I’m staying at Prime Hotel in Beijing. It’s really fancy, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in a hotel that nickled-and-dimed its guests so much. There are items all over the room with hyper-inflated price tags on them. It’s sort of like sleeping in a 7-11. As far as I can tell, nothing is complimentary except the soap and the toilet paper, and I’m sort of keeping my fingers crossed with respect to those.

(Side Note: Before my trip to Montreal, I weighed myself for the first time in years and confirmed that I was just a fat tub of goo. I just weighed myself here in my hotel in Beijing. While I’m still a fat tub of goo, it doesn’t seem so bad in kilograms rather than pounds.)

Well, that’s it for now. Or “then,” as it were, since I won’t be able to publish this for several weeks. At the crack of dawn, I’ll head out into the city a little bit for some breakfast and to find the hostel where I’m meeting the people with which I will be making the Chinese portion of my tour. That should be fun all in and of itself. Then I think I’ll go to Tiananmen Square. I’ll tell you about all that in a future post.