Fourteen of my classmates and I left Dulles Airport on May 29th around noon and flew to Beijing, China. We lost a whole day on that 14 hour flight as Beijing and all of China is 12 hours ahead of E.S.T. And despite the five movies the airline provided to watch, a number of us could not sit still.
I ended up talking with a visiting MIT professor and his wife, as they described their experiences in China; he was headed to Tsinghua University to teach for two weeks — for the 7th year in a row. They and I listened, as a National Guardsman/MBA student from Mercer spoke of his excitement for the upcoming experience in China: starting in Beijing and traveling down the coast to Shanghai for the next two weeks. The flight attendants finally kicked us out of the prep area but these interactions enabled me to overcome my boredom, stretch my legs for a short time, and settle back to sit for another hour or two.
We were served one last meal about an hour before we landed which I recommend you don’t eat, unless you have an ironclad stomach. The meal itself wasn’t bad, but the rapid descent in altitude and the slight turbulence before landing combined to require many of us to use the bags the airline provides. When we pulled up to the gate and the health officials came onto the plane to check our temperatures, I had momentary panic that I’d cause the whole plane to be quarantined, but despite my nausea my forehead felt cool to my touch.
The health officials wore breathing masks, (like the dentist wears when cleaning your teeth) covering the mouth and nose. They moved quickly up the rows pointing a temperature scanner at everyone’s forehead; the device looked like a bar code scanner at a store. This temp scan was in direct response to the H1N1/swine flu scare. As a group we’d seen numerous news stories of people being quarantined in China, and I think we were all nervous that might happen to us. After about ten or fifteen minutes (apparently someone complained of illness up in economy plus and had to be checked out further) we all deplaned.
Unfortunately, for me, the first half hour on the ground passed by in a bright, queasy haze, as it was sunny and the building was mostly windows with gleaming floors, causing a reflective glare that did nothing to settle my stomach. Everyone passed through a temperature gate, immigrations, and hopped a metro to baggage claim. Customs consisted of a few guards stopping people in the hallway to the main terminal; it was perhaps at random, but it appeared their targets, when I went through, were Chinese nationals, though I didn’t hang around to confirm this perception.
As a group we found two taxi vans to take us to the Wenjin Hotel for 420 RMB plus tolls, per van. Roughly $9 apiece, we didn’t realize at the time that we were experiencing our first price quoted especially for foreigners. As we learned farther along in our trip, you can haggle for pretty much everything, and in a taxi ensure that the meter is running. For comparison, the ride back in a taxi for 3 people was just over 100 RMB, working out to be ~23 RMB/$3.45 less per person. While this is a negligible amount after conversion to US dollars, this “overpayment” contributes to the misleading perception of Americans and their great wealth.
