Assorted Ravings of the Slightly-Weird

Top 5 Things...

... I learnt from my recent China trip.

1) Never ever travel during the 1st week of September, or whenever the school holiday is. On the flight back from Shanghai there must have been at least 100 kids on my flight, from at least 3 separate school groups. They were pretty quiet on the plane (and for that I am eternally grateful) but in the departure lounge it was pure havoc. Tens of kids running around screaming, taking photos, yelling out "Who's sitting in 51K?" does not make for a peaceful 30 minutes.

2) Diet Coke is called 健怡可乐 and Equal sweetener is called 怡口糖. As for Evian, it's 依云. Fairly useless information but essential to know if your colleague (who is actually a superior whose good books you need to be in) doesn't speak any Mandarin and only drinks these 2 drinks.

3) The maglev train from Shanghai to the Pudong airport takes 3:15 minutes to accelerate to a top speed of 430kmh (from late night to early morning the top speed is only 330 kmh due to noise levels). It stays at this speed for 45 seconds and begins to decelerate at 4:00 minutes. By 7:20 minutes the ride is over. It's a collosal waste of money - just imagine the energy that it takes to get up to top speed and to stop. Given that I only paid 40 RMB (I got a 20% discount for showing my air ticket) for an economy seat one-way, I'm pretty sure this is a bigass white elephant.

(And btw, there are 2 airports in Shanghai; one at Pudong, the other at Hongqiao. Both have international and domestic flights and are located on either side of the river so if you get the logistics wrong you're basically screwed.)

4) Whoever runs airports in China is loafing on the job. It does not make sense that the Beijing-Shanghai flight does not have a gate assigned; instead, on what must be one of the fuller flights in the schedule, everyone has to cram onto a bus to get to a plane that is seeming out in the middle of nowhere, so much so that for a while it seemed like we were going to take the bus the entire way. It also does not make sense that you would have 2 flights assigned to a gate that take off 10 minutes apart, so you have twice the number of people (with the afore-mentioned 100 kids running about) crammed into the departure lounge. This makes even less sense when you realise that the 2nd plane is actually parked at Gate 12, while the 1st plane is parked at Gate 14 and only the departure lounge for Gate 14 is open for both flights. It can't be that they can't find enough people to man both gates; for goodness's sake, there are 1.3 mn people in that country...

And in case you guys think all I ever do is complain,

5) The Chinese restaurant in the Beijing airport (Viojoy restaurant), where the waitresses wear yellow and purple uniforms, serves the best shrimps I have ever had in my life.

Posted by scrabbyfoo at September 11, 2006 03:58 PM