I am the largest human being in China.
Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 224 user reviews.
Category Archives: Travel
The China World Hotel, by the way, is dazzling. And since my stay is three weeks, I qualified for a “club floor” room, which included all sorts of groovy perks. Starting with complimentary car service from the airport.
I was met by a handler no more than three feet off of the plane, and she whisked me through customs, baggage, and immigration lines with martial efficiency. At the hotel they greeted me like I was a rock star. I was shuttled out of the enormous, gilded, perfumed lobby up to the exclusive Horizon Club where I relaxed and sipped a beverage while they checked me in.
The service in this place is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. There’s a pillow menu in the room, for heaven’s sake.
When I got to the room it was about 4:30 p.m. It was 2:30 a.m. for me and I’d been awake for 23 hours. Still, I felt reasonably okay, so I stumbled down to the lobby and began exploring the huge shopping mall underneath the complex.
I was hoping to find a charger for my GameBoy. This is China, I thought, which is right next to Japan. There’s got to be LOTS of game stores! Sadly the mall was nothing but wildly upscale American and European boutiques, restaurants, and “Le Cool” Ice Skating Rink. I ate at Pizza Hut (sue me), then went back to my room and managed to stay awake until almost ten o’clock.
The next morning, Sunday, I dealt with my jet lag by heading up to the Badaling section of the Great Wall (it’s about an hour out of the city). It’s pretty amazing and I got some good pictures, including several of me atop a very bored Bactrian camel.
There are two major places where you visit the wall near Beijing, and I went to the “less touristy” one. It was still a mass of tacky souvenir stands with shockingly aggressive vendors. How aggressive? Well, if you walked away from them they’d body block you in an attempt to keep your attention while they whittled down their price some more on the crappy t-shirt they wanted to sell you. Or they’d grab you. I’m not very fond of strangers grabbing me for any reason, and let’s just say it’s lucky there was no international incident.
After hours in the bus and lots of steep climbing on and near the Wall, I was ready for bed early.
Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 217 user reviews.
THE FLIGHT
I don’t really fit into coach. I just don’t. My financial status is completely at a disconnect with my actual body.
However, even though my flight had been full for weeks, the airline gods decided to smile on me at the last minute, as some “Economy Plus” seats became available. On United Airlines, they have a class of seat that’s not Business class, but it’s a whopping five inches larger than Sit There and Shut Your Hole Economy class. So for a mere $119, I was able to be much more comfortable for the twelve hour flight.
Who knew five inches could make such a difference. But it did!
As I got comfortable in my seat, and noticed to my relief that, of the four movies they’d be showing us, Scarlet Johansson was only in one of them, I began to review the way I actually felt about the trip.
When you do the sort of work I do, the only thing that can keep your blood pressure at an acceptable level is information. Information about the client, about the classes you’re to teach, about what’s expected of you, dress code, weather, hotel, all that stuff.
For whatever reason, this job had been maddeningly thin on information until the very last minute. And by last minute I mean we had a conference call at 6:00 p.m. That’s twelve hours before my flight was scheduled to leave.
Before this meeting, I hadn’t even seen the outline of the class I’d be teaching in three days.
After the call, I’d found myself unexpectedly grumpy all of a sudden. I realized that, as excited as I was to go, I was also a bit nervous and anxious, too. China. Such an alien place!
After the queasiness that set in after being played by the United Skycap at LAX, I got extremely sleepy on the short flight to San Francisco. By the time I lumbered off the plane at SFO, I was basically the walking dead.
One medium mocha frappe later, the wonders of caffeine had transformed me into a perfectly happy camper. I found myself in a charming conversation with Ron, a teacher helping to escort seventy over privileged private school kiddies to an extended stay in China. Ron was a good conversationalist, the blessed caffeine was percolating merrily through my veins, and I even found a power outlet right by where I was sitting so I could top off the juice in my GameBoy. Clutching my shiny new Economy Plus Fuck You boarding pass, I was as contented as a Halliburton contractor in a warzone.
We board the plane, which of course is a 747. I’ve hardly ever flown on big planes, since my international travel has been fairly limited. There’s just something cinematic about a Boeing 747 that surpasses the more mundane one-aisle airplanes I was more accustomed to flying. I suppose it’s because so many movies with airplane dramas use the larger planes.
Now, sitting in my +5 inch comfy seat awaiting takeoff, I find that I’m as excited about the trip as a little kid on the way to Disneyland.
I keep thinking, embarrassingly corny as it sounds, that all I want to do is to do a great job on this gig. I want everyone to be pleased: the students, the client, Heidi, and me.
Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 213 user reviews.
A SELF-ESTEEM-CHALLENGING BEGINNING
I begin my Asian Odyssey by being scammed by the United Airlines Skycap guy.
In my defense, it was 4:30 in the morning and I barely had a pulse, much less upper brain function.
Here’s what happened. After weighing my single bag for check-in, the Skycap came over and informed me my bag was 5 pounds overweight. I wasn’t surprised. (YOU try to pack for a three-week business trip without going over fifty pounds.)
Mr. Helpful Skycap took my passport, credit card and boarding pass and bounded away to get my $50 overweight fee paid. Ten minutes later he returned.“I talked him out of the fee!” His eyes shone with conspiratorial glee. “All I had to do was tip him $20.”
Okay, okay, I know, all of my alarm signals should have gone off at that point. Like I said, it was 4:30 in the morning, I wanted off the sidewalk and into the terminal, and I just didn’t have the strength to start off the staggeringly long travel day with a showdown with this guy. Remember, he’s the person in charge of getting my bag to Beijing. I was afraid that getting into it with him would be the equivalent of harassing a waiter, only to have your soup spit in. I didn’t want my overweight bag to end up in Yemen.
I pulled out my walled and sourly gave him $15.Of course, as I stood in the (football field length, even at 4:40 in the a.m.) security line, I had more and more time to think about it and get humiliated and angry. I told my story to several UA personnel, and mostly what I got was a very annoying, “Well, you know those guys don’t work for the airline.”
Well, fuck you, United Airlines. The Skycaps wear United Airlines jackets and they check you in for United Airlines flights. They’re representing United Airlines, goddamnit. Eat me.
After several employees managed to convince me that, being ripped off aside, my bag would most assuredly end up in Beijing, I was able to relax a bit and go from feeling anxious to merely stupid.Then I got my first laugh of the day as I had an early breakfast at “Ruby’s Cafe.” Ruby’s is an ersatz classic 50s All-American coffee shop, with the exception that, like most airport eateries, you stood in a line and gave your order at the front register.
I sat down to await my $15 egg sandwich and noticed that my table, like all the others, had on its side, in a classic chrome metal clip, a bright red-and-white menu. Just like diners of days gone by! Hang on, I thought. Why did I order up front.Curiously, I pulled out the large laminated rectangular menu, only to discover it wasn’t a menu at all! It just LOOKED like a menu! The cafe was actually using props. Maybe it was the hour, but this struck me as uniquely hilarious.
Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 298 user reviews.
My goal is to do some actual blogging during my upcoming trip to China. So WATCH THIS SPACE for dispatches from the Inscrutable East!
Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 210 user reviews.
Well, it’s official! I leave for Beijing on March 25, and will be working there for three weeks.
I wonder how much Mandarin I can learn in two weeks?
I wonder if it’s easy to find a McDonald’s in Beijing?
Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 206 user reviews.