It begins

I arrived at O’Hare at 8:15 a.m. and went to United to check in for the flight. Everyone was going through the check in process rather quickly, and then it was my turn. My large bag weighed 103 lbs, $390.00 overweight. The ticket agent was nice, he told me he could sell me a box in which I was allowed put 35 lbs worth of stuff and take it with me for an additional $130.00. So, there I am unloading my bag and tossing suits, shirts and other personal items into a brown cardboard box. Once I was done with repacking, it was off to the gate.

At the gate, I learned that the flight was delayed. The ground crew had found a fuel leak in an engine, there was no estimated time of departure. At 10:15, no flight information was available, the gate attendants disappeared and I began to worry about my 3:00 connecting flight out of Vancouver to Beijing. As Rick was checking websites for other airlines, I used the courtesy phone to call reservations. To my surprise United came through and booked me on the 12:30 direct flight to Beijing, they even honored my Air Canada ticket. The Air Canada ticket was about one-half the price of a United ticket.

If I never come back to the States it is because I do not want to be in a long tube hurtling through the air at 550 mph for 13 hours. That flight was a flight from hell. One piece of advice, on a flight of that length do not use the lavatory after 9 hours in the air...nothing more to say about that except, that the smell prepares you for the smells of Nan Chang City, China.

The flight took us over, well damn near, the North Pole and Siberia and northern China. Looking out the window of the plane it was hard to comprehend the vast empty land. For hours, there was nothing on the ground to be seen, just mountains and valleys. Those regions are barren.

Once we landed, I had to get my bags, I grabbed a Porter and we went off to the baggage carousel to wait for my bags. We waited and waited and waited and waited. My bags are lost (United calls it misplaced). Before I left O’Hare I checked with several people to make sure my bags made it on my flight. United let me down there. The only good thing is that I did not have to pay Air China extra money for the extra/overweight bag because United now has to get them to me. As of this writing, Sunday the 9th of September, my bags and I are still not reunited.

By the way, the Porter wore a tag that said free. LOL he took me for $100.00 RMB (about $8.50 US)

A word of warning: beware of gaggles of Korean women at airport baggage carousels. They pushed and shoved the Porter and me out of the way to get at their baggage. It was like the videos you see of women trying to buy a wedding dress at some annual sale in NYC.

The United flight got me to Beijing City International Airport about 6 hours before my connecting flight to Hangzhou, after the bag fiasco I had about 4.5 hours to kill. What do you do when you are exhausted and have that much time to kill. I don’t remember anything except sitting and talking with an American named Blake for several hours in a cafe.

The Air China flight was uneventful. However, when I arrived there was no one at the airport to meet me. I started to worry and was preparing to check for hotel for the night when my “minder” arrived.

Hangzhou China is where I landed at about 10:30 on Monday the 3rd of September. It was raining on the drive into the city. The drive was in a vehicle they call a LeBoucher, a mini loaf of bread type van. It clanked, clanged, chugged and heaved its way to the city and my accommodations for the night; a dorm room at a university. It was here that I learned the true meaning of “squatter”; the standard Chinese commode is a porcelain hole in the floor. Moreover, though they use it, toilet paper is not available in public restrooms. Enough on that, except my apartment here in Nan Chang has American type facilities. Happy happy joy joy. Though, the shower is on the wall between the commode and sink so you shit where you shower.

I spent 1.5 days in Hangzhou. If the company I was working with was organized, I could have been in and out of there in 5 hours. I am learning that the Chinese way of doing things has to be a certain way and that is it.

I left Hangzhou on the 12:37 train to Nan Chang, 376 miles away. The train traveled at 120 mph, that was neat. I did not have a window seat so I did not get to see a lot of the countryside, what I did see was interesting. Rice paddies everywhere. I saw very little to no husbandry. There were lots of empty brick apartment buildings and factories. We traveled through a four-mile long tunnel, right through the middle of a mountain.

I arrived in Nan Chang City at about 4:30 and was met by Joanna (her Chinese name is Quan Hong) who unceremoniously dropped me off at my apartment and told me that there is a dining room over there somewhere. By that time I did not care, I just needed to rest; I really needed to sleep, that not easy to do because of my bed. The typical Chinese bed is less comfortable than sleeping on a box spring. The bed feels like a piece of plywood with ¼ inch of padding. I did sleep, not comfortably but it was sleep.

TBC