China Trip: Getting There

One typical part of the Chinese adoption experience is the couple of days' sightseeing that happen before meeting the child. This serves two purposes: to get the family a chance to see some of the "must-see" sites around Beijing, and to provide a couple of days' cushion in case of any travel issues. For some agencies, this is mandatory. It was optional for ours, but we were eager for the chance to see Beijing.

Originally, our travel agent had suggested a four-day guided tour package beginning the day after our arrival. This seemed like too much too fast. There is an exactly twelve-hour difference between China (all of China; China has only one time zone for the whole country) and Eastern Standard Time. That means it's noon in Beijing at midnight in Boston. The flight over is 13-14 hours, plus (for us) the drive up to Boston and the connecting flight and layover in (lovely) Newark NJ.

So we figured we'd need some recovery time.

We booked the travel to leave one day later, and set it up so that we were free our first full day in Beijing. That left us with a day and a half of guided sightseeing before our flight to Nanjing.

Cape Destinations (the airport limo service) arrived 15 minutes early (that would be 4:45 AM). Frantic feeding of cats and loading of suitcases followed. The driver knew some of the people on the Cape involved in international adoption. We had smooth traffic in spite of construction on the Sagamore Bridge. We headed up Route 3 to I-93, through the Ted Williams Tunnel and into Logan Airport.

We were early, so we played around with the laptop while Gynn had tea at Au Bon Pain. We also had muffins from Osterville Cheese Shop that we'd picked up on Tuesday. Very yummy! Logan doesn't have free WiFi. :( Or at least they make you jump through more hoops than I was willing to deal with for "sponsored" access).

We had an empty seat between us on the flight to Newark, which was nice. We switched seats a couple of times. Got a "lovely" view of the oil refineries along the NJ Turnpike as we came in for a landing in Newark.

It was about 9:30, and we were already hungry. We waited a bit for the food court restaurants to open. I got a burger from Nathans. Eventually. The employees seemed a lot more interested in some workplace drama/gossip than, you know, doing their jobs. At least the burger and fries were pretty good. Last American food for a few weeks! (Um, actually, no. Continental had other plans as far as that went). Gynn had (bad, apparently) pasta from Sbaro.

We headed to our gate, which was further than we had expected. We were lulled by the fact that it was in the same terminal. Newark's terminals are BIG. But they make up for it with moving sidewalks! Gotta love that! We arrived as they were starting to board coach, which was actually excellent timing.

So we boarded our Boeing 777 jet and took off on our nonstop flight to Beijing.

Before we left, people had been asking me whether a nonstop flight from Newark to Beijing goes East or West. I thought it was West based on Continental's route map. But that map just shows which cities are connected. It doesn't show the actual route.

As it turns out, we go NORTH.

Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, over the Arctic, and then down through Siberia. That's where we are right now, flying over vast stretches of (presumably) tundra and taiga (dual lands!) in the backcountry of the former Soviet Union.

The tech on the plane was awesome. This was the first long flight we'd been on since our honeymoon, and boy have things changed. Individual touch-screen video monitors with on-demand movies, TV episodes, music, and even some basic video games. There was also a flight information display that shows a basic GPS map of where we are.

We were across an aisle from each other, which was nice in terms of bathroom access. To my left was a rather restless toddler. I got to thinking of him as "practice for the flight home". Afte

r I greeted him with "ni hau", he decided I was his new best friend.

I loved the fact that the airplane safety card warns specifically against the use of remote-controlled cars on the plane!

Meals were sorta reversed. Dinner then lunch then breakfast. Dinner was typical airline fare with a bit of an attempt at Chinese cooking: Beef with broccoli, carrots, and sticky rice. Also a salad with smoked salmon (which was actually quite yummy), a roll, a pack of Pepperidge Farms Milano Cookies (!) and a fortune cookie. My fortune was a reminder that good karma comes to those who show kindness and compassion. The beef and rice were a tad overcooked, but the flavor was decent. There was also a fish entree, but they were out of it by the time they got to our section of the plane.

For our second meal ("lunch" or maybe this is just considered a snack), Continental decided they wanted to go with something traditionally American. A hot dog. No, really. Everyone got a hot dog baked into a crescent roll kinda thingee, and a little cup of Hagen Daaz ice cream.

Third meal was breakfast. Advice: When given a choice between dim sum and eggs for breakfast on Continental Airlines, you are definitely better off with the dim sum. We both had it and it was quite tasty (certainly not the best dim sum I've had, but still decent). The eggs looked like scary airline food.

Everyone had their shades down on the plane so the actual landing came with a "Wait? That was it? We're on the ground?" reaction from me.

Here's our plane at the gate after landing.

Beijing Airport is HUGE. I am pretty sure it's the biggest such facility I've ever been in and I've been in some of the bigger US ones. Everything about it is on a massive scale.

Getting through the airport involved four major steps:

1) Health screening. Gynn had a runny nose from the air on the plane and had checked it off on the symptoms list on the card that everyone had to fill out. It was better when we got to the screening, so she explained this and got taken behind the curtained-off-area-of-doom while I spent a few minutes worrying that they'd come out and tell me she'd been quarantined for H1N1/SARS/Bird Flu/Zombie Plague. They just had her re-do the card.

2) Immigration. Pretty straightforward. Stand in line, they look at your passport, they stamp your passport. The booth had a little machine to rate the customer service you had received. The officer's badge number was programed in and there were buttons with various smileys to indicate your degree of satisfaction. I gave my immigration officer an "Extremely Satisfied". She was cute in a Peoples-Liberation-Army kinda way.

We then took a brief interlude to ride a light rail train to another part of the terminal for baggage and customs. No problems so far with language. Signs and announcements have been in Chinese and English so far.

3) Baggage. Our first scare. Got the suitcases no problem. Optimus Prime had gone missing ("Optimus Prime" is what we named the transforming car seat/stroller). Wasn't on the baggage carousel. Checked the "Oversized Baggage" area. Nothing there at all. Went to "Baggage Inquiries" and ran into language difficulties. After following their directions, getting lost, and going back and asking again, we finally got to another lost-and-found area where we were directed to another oversized baggage area we had not seen before and Optimus was sitting right there.

4) Customs. Walked straight out through the "Nothing to Declare" line with only a few "I declare that I'm glad to be off that plane" jokes.

So we finally walked out through an area with crowds of people holding up signs, and toward the end of that was the gentleman from the tour company with the sign with our names on it. He introduced himself as Rocky, which in addition to the obvious levels on which it is amusing also had me laughing because it's the name that a Chinese character in the novel The Middle Kingdom (which I just read) has chosen as his English name.

Rocky took us to parking lot where his partner is waiting with their van, and we drove about 30 minutes to get to downtown Beijing.

The first impression of Beijing is the smog. There is a thick haze over the whole city. It's not noxious or foul-smelling or anything, but it is all-pervasive.

Driving in Beijing is definitely a bit scary, but we arrived safely at the hotel and checked into our room. This was about 4 PM local time. I went and got some money changed at the hotel desk and then walked a block or so to a little drink stand and bought two bottles of cold bottled water. My first transaction with a local went very well. She held up 4 fingers, I gave her a 5 yuan bill, she gave me back a one and I said xiexie and headed back to the hotel. Yay for cash being the universal language.

In case you're curious, $100 got me 675 yuan. That means a yuan is worth approximately $.15, which also means the bottled waters were a reasonable bargain at $.30 each.

After that we both pretty much went right to sleep. We got a decent amount of sleep, but of course we were both wide awake at 3 AM.

We also couldn't get any of the lights to work in the hotel room. Early in the morning Gynn went down the the desk and they sent a maintenance guy up, who very quickly pointed out the card-reader thingee that we had completely missed. You need to put your room key in it to "turn on" the room. Now we know. Hotel guy went on his way, probably muttering about "dumb meiguoren".

Breakfast buffet opened at 6 AM. Yum! It was really good. I had some smoked herring and salmon, some fried rice, a dim sum roll, a dumpling, a little sausage, and some hash browns. Gynn had exotic fruits. All delicious. And there were lots of other choices as well.

Here is the hotel sign from the street.

And the view out our hotel room window.

Lots more pictures in my next post, which covers our first day in Beijing.