brappy!

China Eastern, originally uploaded by brappy!.

I have put this off for too long... but I need to tell the story of my experience at the Xi'an Airport.
I arrived plenty early for my 9.45a flight to Guangzhou and checked in. I cleared security with no problems and sat, waiting for my flight to board. At 9.35a, an announcement was made: my flight was now delayed until 2 o'clock!

I had been making all of these snotty jokes inside my head about how China Eastern flights are ALWAYS late. It's kind of true. Go to any airport that has MU flights and you'll soon see that their flights are the ones that are massively delayed everywhere. At Xi'an, the announcements were even better - "MU flight blah blah blah to Bayjin (sic) is delayed due to airline." Ain't that the truth. It was also rather odd that the announcements, clearly done by a native Mandarin speaker and non-native English speaker pronounced Beijing in a way I've never heard. Only when I heard the announcement in Japanese did I get it.

That'll teach me to make jokes at other's expense! Seriously!

After an hour, and some discussion with the non-English speaking staff, I decided to wait for my flight. Around 10.30, a man rounded us up and told us we were going to a hotel as the flight was now delayed until tomorrow... or whenever.

Since I had confirmed reservations on China Airlines from Hong Kong that evening, it was imperative that I get to Guangzhou as early in the day. I made my way out to the ticket counter and worked my way into the throng of people. At the front of the clump, a man was yelling at a ticketing agent, and not getting much response from her. In frustration, he grabbed a stack of plastic cards off of the desk and threw them at her. Unphased, she kept typing away. A woman on my other side was screaming at full volume into my ear about her ticket. No one was helping her either. After a few minutes of this, I turned to the screaming woman and told her to "shut up! No one is listening to you!" She got quiet. I turned back and realized that everyone was staring at me.

I walked away and decided to go to the bathroom for a few minutes and wait for things to calm down.

After a bit, I was able to change my ticket to another airline (by getting one ticket refunded in cash and passing the cash to the next ticket clerk) and paid 300RMB more to go to Shenzhen, a few miles south of Guangzhou, instead.

My noon flight to Shenzhen left on time and was quite pleasant. There's a reason why they call China Southern the best-run airline in China.

On the plane, however, I was seated next to a stinky 80 year-old grandfather who had never been on a plane before. He didn't speak Mandarin or Cantonese. He was very much out of place. I had to put his seatbelt on for him after he tried to buckle it backwards... it was bizarre.

Shenzhen, city of Whores and Thieves, was pretty. Good weather had left the Pearl River Delta with a lot of clear skies and I was shocked, after being in Beijing and Xi'an, at how blue the sky could be. I really felt like things were looking up for me. But, alas, how wrong was I...