Flying me crazy

Domestic flight. It sounds so cosy, doesn’t it, as though they might bring you a pair of slippers and a cup of cocoa? But I tell you I have yet to get off a plane after the two or three hours it takes to fly from Harbin to Shanghai (or back again) without feeling the need to do some serious harm to myself or others. The most patient of saints would find the experience ‘trying’, as Flora Poste (ooh, a literary reference!) would say.

I can only assume that Chinese airlines issue their passengers with a different set of ‘Do’s and Don’ts’ instructions from everyone else in the world. Here’s how it might read.

Arrival and Check-in

1. On first arriving at the airport, we recommend the person giving you a lift parks at a crazy angle at the set-down point. This will make it as difficult as possible for other passengers to get out of their cars and get into the terminal ahead of you.

2. On entering the airport, your luggage may be scanned at the door. This is of course pointless as we are going to give it a full x-ray later but we do like to keep our staff occupied, so please do co-operate with this.

3. Next identify your correct check-in desk from the screens. This will not be easy due to the fact that we will not display your actual flight time, merely the check-in time, and also that several flight numbers, belonging to several different airlines, will in reality all correspond to the same plane.

4. Having found your desk, the trick is to remember that there is really no such thing as a check-in queue. I mean, what is a queue anyway? Something dreamt up by the British, so we heard. Anyway, you can pretty much approach the desk as and when you feel like it. Some passengers do choose to wait in line and this is their prerogative, but should they happen to leave more than a centimetre of space between them and the person in front, the non-queuers have the right to intercept. Do please bear this in mind if you are foolish enough to opt for the waiting strategy.

5. When you are eventually served, please do not expect the check-in staff to listen to your requests with regard to seating arrangements. This is NOT their job, unless of course you are interrupting the customer currently being served. If you are travelling with four generations of your extended family (as you obviously will be), it is best to get seats as far apart as possible. This will allow you maximum shouting potential during the course of the flight, as well as an excuse for wandering up and down whenever the fasten seatbelt signs are illuminated, both of which are crucial to your enjoyment of the flight.

6. Please note the minimum checked baggage requirement is one box of vegetables tied up with string, per person. Other foodstuffs such as bags of sausages may be carried as hand luggage. Please do NOT check in oversize suitcases. These should be retained as hand luggage and stored in the overhead lockers for the maximum inconvenience of others.

Security, passport control and boarding

1. Here in China we pride ourselves on having the fastest and most efficient airport security staff in the world. Please remember though that we are duty-bound to appear scary. Such behaviour as smiling at passport control staff, or saying ‘Ni hao’ or other such potentially subversive remarks, is therefore strictly prohibited, and will be viewed as evidence that you are Up To Something.

2. When passing through the security gates, please try to ensure you have NO metal anywhere on your person. We are quite unable to adjust our metal detectors to distinguish between a zip or a bra fastening and a howitzer. Seriously, those bra fastenings can be lethal in the wrong hands. Of course the fact that everyone therefore sets off the alarm gives us a good excuse to grope you. We guarantee that you will always be groped by someone of the opposite sex to avoid embarrassment boredom. If you wish us to feel your boobs a little more, or stick our hands a little further down your trousers, please ask. We aim to please our customers.

3. On arrival at the boarding gate, please remember the rule is at least two seats per person. You may sleep here if you wish. In fact we recommend it; you will have a long wait, as your flight will not board until a minimum of half an hour later than the time announced. As this is now standard practice, no explanation or apology will be offered. We may however call your flight two or three times before the real boarding time. We find this helps to keep our passengers alert and to weed out the weaker ones who didn’t really want to fly that much anyway.

4. About ten minutes before the plane is due to board, you may start to queue. Please see ‘Arrival and Check-in’ point 4, above, for rules governing queueing. Since you will now be less hampered by luggage, you are free to use your elbows to secure your place. If you choose to wait until the flight is actually boarding, you will of course be last onto the plane and have nowhere to store your hand luggage. Some customers enjoy this, however, at it provides greater potential for arguments with their fellow travellers, which is all part of the package.

5. At the gate, your boarding pass will be checked and scanned. Three seconds later it will be checked again by a teenage trainee who watched it being scanned, but needs to check again in case you defaced it or accidentally ran to a different gate in the interim. He or she will then point in the direction of the plane. We find this is necessary as some of our customers have not seen an aircraft before and become easily confused.

On the plane

1. Boarding an aircraft poses a challenge for the Chinese traveller, as it entails a certain amount of waiting for the person in front of you to finish stowing their luggage and sit down, with minimum pushing-past space available. Please accept our apologies while we do what we can to rectify this situation, but in the meantime we suggest you look for opportunities to shove people into the backs of seats, kick them, and of course shout at them wherever you can.

2. We assume that at least three members of your party will never have flown previously, so there will be time before we take off for them to take photographs of the cabin staff, the overhead lockers, the exits, etc. We positively encourage excited shouting at all times.

3. Please explain to your relatives that the safety instructions are there to be disregarded. In particular, the rules pertaining to the wearing of seatbelts are simply quite irrelevant to all Chinese passengers. Small children should be prompted to sit on the floor between seats during take-off, or in the aisle during the at-seat trolley service. Keeping as much luggage on your lap as possible will help to make things dangerous for everyone, so we recommend this.

4. Food will be served during your flight, in the form of the standard ‘Box of Strangeness’. This will consist of: a hot meal (either chicken or beef with either rice or noodles), some pickled stuff, some ‘mixed fruit’ (which, being a packet of peanuts, is neither fruit nor mixed), a sweet roll of some description, cough drops, and another random odd fruit or vegetable-based product. Hot towels (or ‘turbans’ as we prefer to call them) will be provided. However, please feel free to consume your own snacks, especially if they a) smell overpoweringly of fish or b) are swimming in soy sauce which may leak all over your tray table and run off into the lap of your neighbour. If this happens, it is essential that you avoid all verbal or eye contact with the neighbour in question, even when he or she summons the flight attendant to mop up your mess for you.

5. Very important. You have the right to recline your seat at any time except during take-off and landing. However, the person sitting in front of you does not. Should they disregard this rule please adopt the following procedure: first shout at them; then, if they do not immediately straighten up, grasp their headrest firmly with both hands and shake their seat vigorously. Repeat, with shouting, until they either relent or pretend to fall asleep.

Landing and disembarkation

1. The announcement that the plane is about to land is your cue to get up to use the lavatory. Correct practice is to wait until the person who has been waiting the longest is about to go in, and then push in front of them.

2. Upon touchdown, please leap immediately from your seat and start retrieving your luggage from the overhead compartments. Any suggestion that you should ‘remain in your seat until the aircraft has come to a complete standstill’ is clearly preposterous and is just said to test you. In fact, it’s a little game we like to play in order to train our cabin staff in the vital skill of shouting. On noticing half the passengers on their feet while the plane is still moving very fast along the runway, they will charge down the aisle yelling at you to sit down and close the lockers. Your job is to sit down while they are looking at you, and then immediately get up again the instant their back is turned. Several repetitions of this sequence will help to pass those boring minutes while you are waiting to reach the terminal building.

3. The retrieval of luggage from lockers and getting off the plane presents some of the same problems as boarding. Here, however, you have the advantage of being able to drop large items onto your fellow passengers’ heads or toes. If disembarking in a cold climate, this is also the moment to try to don your winter wardrobe while everyone else is doing the same in a very tight, warm and enclosed space.

4. On finding yourself at the Baggage Reclaim point inside the terminal, it is best to position yourself a maximum of six inches from the opening through which the cases will emerge. This will enable you to grab the first item you see which resembles yours without allowing anyone else to get a look at it. If you are unlucky enough not to be one of the dozen people occupying this same spot at any one time, you can stake your territory by using your trolley as an offensive weapon and simply push others, and their trolleys, aside. Please don’t forget to shout loudly to the other members of your party while doing this; it really does relieve tension.

5. Another member of staff will be positioned at the exit from the Baggage Reclaim hall to scan the bar code on your suitcase and that on your boarding pass, to check that they match and that you have therefore got the right luggage. We are however considering abandoning this last policy as it is just too damn sensible and we are unable to see any potential problems which might arise from it.

For a slightly preferable form of air travel, please see here.

Of cabbages and things

Of all the sentences I ever thought I’d hear myself utter, ‘Oh God, I’m SOOO BORED of coming to Shanghai now!’ wasn’t one of them.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place – or at least what we’ve seen of it is (if you don’t mind air and noise pollution, excessive humidity and being almost mown down by scooters whenever you try to walk anywhere). It’s just that we seem to have spent a disproportionate amount of our time on a plane between here and Harbin, en route to or from an airport, or walking through the vast echoing halls of Pudong Terminal 2, which could be a fitness plan in its own right if you didn’t fancy any other forms of exercise. We’re up and down here so often that I’m becoming convinced that a) there are in fact no other places in China besides Harbin and Shanghai, and b) they’re just next door to one another, whereas in fact a) China’s ginormous and b) er, China’s ginormous and the distance between Shanghai & Harbin is about 1000 miles – a 2 and a half hour flight, or the equivalent of flying from Edinburgh to Prague or London to Rome and back every couple of weeks. No wonder it’s a drag.

Every time we come here we’re either in transit to somewhere else, always either jet-lagged or about to be and never have a chance to look around, or alternatively – as this time - we’re here to complete some tiresome visa-related errand involving being relieved of our passports for several days and generally messed about. And, having left Harbin complaining of the cold, here it’s still slightly disagreeably muggy and Peter, predictably, has done nothing but moan about the heat, while the aircon in the hotel is of course off since it’s now ‘winter’ (I even saw a girl in a woolly hat this morning).

As you’ll have gathered, I’m in a bad mood. I won’t be happy until we get these damn visas sorted out once and for all. But, in order to maintain peace and harmony and keep you entertained, I’m going to ignore it and tell you an interesting aside instead.

Last time he was down here, Peter was told that up until about twenty years ago - presumably before many people had fridges or freezers and before the advent of long-distance distribution and supermarket chains in China - it was common practice in Shanghai for everyone to have a stock of cabbages for the winter, which they kept outside on the ground or on their balconies so that they would remain cold. The cabbages were delivered about now, October, and kept throughout the winter, slowly rotting, but come February people would still be eating them, peeling off the outer rotten leaves to find they were still edible inside.

In modern Shanghai today you don’t see much of this, apparently. But the outdoor fridge tradition would appear to be alive and well in Harbin. Yesterday as we were driven to the airport we noticed that on every available space – on pavements, roadsides, front steps of apartment blocks and shops, hanging from balconies, windowsills and doorknobs, and being transported around on stalls, carts and bikes – were hundreds and hundreds of ….

LEEKS !!!

(Plus a few cabbages for good measure.)

They hadn’t been there a couple of days before. Where did they come from? Was yesterday one of those dates which everyone just knows by osmosis is Leek Day? I bet in two weeks’ time if you try to get leeks in the supermarket there won’t be a single one to be had.

Anyway, on a loosely related topic, for the Have I Got News for You fans among you, here’s the missing words round.

Frustrated Welsh farmers face prison over [....... ?]

Woman catches [......?] from garden badgers, report claims

Headlines from Farmers’ Weekly; don’t you just love trade journals?

Maybe we should tell the Welsh farmers about the Harbin leek glut? You never know; it might help.

One Week in China

Welcome, folks, to the inaugural posting on my China blog. Wonderful wonderful technology allows me to bring this to you with -hopefully - no interference from government internet censors (the ‘Great Firewall of China’ of which you may have heard tell). I hope over the next couple of years to keep you all updated regularly with developments and observations on this truly bizarre new life of ours. Please feel free to pass on the link to anyone I’ve missed but who you think might be interested (within reason!).

Peter came out a week before me as you know, and had a chance to go to our home-town-to-be, Harbin, to look at a couple of flats, on which more below. His initial stay there was remarkable mostly for the novel definition of ‘room service’ embraced by a certain French hotel chain which shall remain anonymous. On his first afternoon he was just trying to take a nap when the phone rang in his room. A woman was whispering something in Chinese. For some reason he got the impression that it was the wifie who had cleaned his room that morning who was worried he might be unhappy about something. She kept saying ‘Rooma rooma {incomprehensible Chinese word} one, two – yes, no?’ After several minutes of What? and Sorry? and repeating ‘Don’t understand’ in Chinese, he hung up. A couple of minutes later the phone rang again and after going through the same non-conversation a second time, he finally said ‘Room hao’ (good) to express that he was quite happy with it, thank you very much.

The next thing he knew, the room doorbell went and there was a small woman outside with large sunglasses on. She marched in, deposited a carrier bag on the floor, turned round and repeated the ‘Rooma {Chinese} one two yes? mantra but this time she made a massage type action with her fingers. He said ‘Ah - no thanks’, shook his head and went back towards the door - but she wasn’t taking that for an answer. Pointing at his willy she said the Chinese word again. He said ‘NO!’ but as he headed for the door she made a lunge for his privates. He opened the door, grabbed her hand an inch from his bits and pushed her out. She skipped back for her carrier bag and beat it immediately. When he reported this encounter to his interpreter the next day, the lad nearly wet himself laughing. ‘She wasn’t saying “rooma” she was saying “woman”’, he said. ‘She wanted to know if you wanted one woman or two, and when you said ‘room good’ that was an invitation to go ahead!’ Peter asked him if this was common and he said ‘Oh yes – all the hotels have an arrangement with locals to make sure every need is satisfied. Many people require this service’!! What would Basil Fawlty have made of it all, I wonder?

Having escaped with his virtue intact, it was back to Shanghai to meet me off the plane and begin the tiresome task of applying for our residency permits etc. The first requirement for this was to undergo the ‘Aliens Exit-Entry’ medical (something painful involving Sigourney Weaver surely?). This is essentially a ridiculous production line designed to ‘process’ as many ‘aliens’ as they can in the shortest possible time. They get through probably 40-50 patients an hour, chiefly by having a clutch of nurses running up and down the corridor barking orders at you: ‘Go in there! Take off shoes! Lie on bed! Breathe! Hold breath! Again! Finish! Now wait outside room 206! Next!’ It was probably just as well I was in a jet-lagged haze, having been forced to endure this less than 24 hours after landing. Perhaps Peter’s Harbin hotel friend intended to conduct her business in a similar fashion? Anyway I can only assume it’s been designed purely as a money-spinner, as the relevance of most of the tests escapes me. A blood test for AIDS and TB I can understand but honestly, an eye test? Peering in the ears? Poking my stomach for 20 seconds, a quick ECG and an ultrasound of my liver and kidneys? How exactly do these determine whether I should be allowed to stay in China or not?

Peter had already had his medical before I arrived and his results happily came back as ‘Normal’ - “Even my liver!” he announced with some surprise. (No one can tell us what happens if your results are not Normal. They certainly don’t treat you, and may indeed ship you home, possibly dumping you overboard into Japanese waters as they go.) Unfortunately though, even the Normal are subject to the whims of the Chinese authorities who have decided, it now transpires, to change the rules so that Peter will have to fly to Hong Kong or possibly even back to the UK to get his visa sorted. By spectacularly bad timing our arrival has coincided with ongoing Olympics-induced visa paranoia, so we remain somewhat in limbo at the moment.

Apart from that our stay in Shanghai was unremarkable, owing to the fact that I’m still waking up at 4.30am every night so I’m permanently too tired to go out unless I have to. I have no idea why 4.30am, as that’s 9.30pm UK time, but that’s jetlag for you. My Dad never believed jetlag existed (then again, he never believed stereo existed either) and I so wish he was around for me to set him straight.

Anyway, due to this it was somewhat reluctantly that I flew up to Harbin with Peter on Wednesday so that I could see our new flat. A couple of pictures above. It’s the most extraordinary place I’ve ever seen, with décor like something out of a 1960s sci-fi film and a whole host of gadgets, including an all-singing all-dancing shower complete with lights, massage jets and sound system, of which the owner guy was immensely proud. It’s got 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a central air-con unit and under-floor heating throughout. The contract should hopefully be signed today, and with any luck it’ll be available for us to move our stuff into within a few days – if not ourselves, as we have to go back to Shanghai next week to sort things out, so it’s a couple more weeks in hotels unfortunately.

Our goods which we sent out by air freight have arrived and look very strange and surreal sitting in the corner of Peter’s office. The rest of the stuff (19 boxes thereof!) will take about 3 months by sea, so we took the precaution of flying out our winter clothes, as it’ll be below zero in Harbin by mid-November. It’s still in the mid-high 20s here now (not counting this afternoon’s sudden torrential storm), but public buildings have had their air-con switched off as of 1st Sept as it is now officially ‘cold’, having been up into the high 30s in July & August. Then in winter it’s minus 15 by day, minus 30 by night. Actual proper seasons; that’ll take some getting used to.

Peter’s job is going well and they are busy building the team for the new business. All are apparently very impressed with his couple of sentences of Chinese. Getting lost walking back to the hotel and a trip to the supermarket on my own have almost been enough to shock me out of my denial with regard to learning the language. If I can at least master ‘I don’t speak Chinese’ it’ll be an advantage!

Before you go, scroll back to the top to check out a couple of the spectacular photos which Peter managed to take from the plane over, we think, Mongolia at dawn.

Keep us posted on all the news from home.

Love
M&P