Step one in going from Shijiazhuang to Shanghai is to get to the Shijiazhuang airport. The city planners have been thinking ahead, and have placed the airport so far from town that after 40 minutes of driving through the countryside I began getting cold sweats thinking that our cab driver had misunderstood us and was actually going to drive us to Shanghai. But these cold sweats came after quite a few warmer sweats caused by our cabbie’s actual driving. She was the first female Shijiazhuangian taxi driver I had seen, and any questions about her aggressiveness were answered when she went careening into the first major intersection and just turned left into traffic, causing oncoming cars to slam on their brakes, swerve, and double their efforts on the horn. This was just a warm-up. Once some distance out of town on the highway, I noticed that she had taken her foot off the gas and was dialing her cell phone. Duli’s and my conversation slowed to a halt in parallel with the cab. We were idling in lane two, with a fork in the road just ahead. The cab driver was yelling excitedly into the phone, and someone on the other end was either giving her directions or pleading with her not to kill us. Duli’s and my heads snapped left and right as we watched cars zip by on either side until, satisfied with the “phone a friend” answer, she began driving again.
If we made it to the airport, we’d be flying Spring Airlines on Emily’s suggestion. When I had mentioned Spring Airlines to Phil, he didn’t really respond right away. “Hmm. They have a reputation for always being delayed. But I’m sure they will be cheap.” That they were, so we jumped at the opportunity to book. Unfortunately, the way we submitted our passport information was something of a telephone game. Each guy got his passport. Someone wrote down passport numbers on a piece of paper. I transcribed the numbers onto the computer. Lucy pinged the numbers to her husband via instant messaging. Lucy’s husband plugged the numbers into the online booking site. So as luck would have it, something went awry with Tom’s passport number, and when we checked in he had to go to some other counter and pay approximately $3 (20 Yuan) to have the number changed. We decided to have some fun, and Mukul called Lucy.
“Lucy, we have a bit of a situation. Tom’s passport number was incorrect on his reservation, so they confiscated his passport and have led him away to a small room.”
[Quite a bit of excited chatter on the other end of the line]
“There is an official coming this way. Can you please talk to him?” Mukul handed me the phone.
“Wei?”
“Wei, ni hao,” and the stream of Mandarin that followed made absolutely no sense to me but I could tell Lucy was a bit nervous. We all laughed. Lucy let out a sigh of relief and wished us well on our trip, undoubtedly plotting her revenge. After congratulating ourselves on our clever joke, one of the guys got a text message from Emily: “Enjoy Shanghai. Oh, I should have mentioned, Spring Airlines is always delayed.”
Our flight was scheduled to depart at 5:20 pm. We boarded at 4:45, repeatedly looking at our watches with skepticism. We pulled away from the gate at 5:05. By 5:15 we were in the air.
This was our second indication that this airline does things a bit differently. The first occurred when they forced Mukul to gate check his roll-aboard bag. Sounds normal, until you take into account the fact that Mukul’s roll-aboard is about one-fourth the size of the average roll-aboard one encounters in the US. I was carrying on a duffel bag for the weekend that could have fit at least two of Mukul’s bags inside. Perhaps there was extremely limited overhead space? Not so. This Airbus 320 had some of the largest overhead compartments I’d ever seen, and they had a luxurious amount of space available inside. My bag got a compartment of its own. Mukul fumed.
My recommendation to Spring Airlines would be to take some of the overhead space and apply it to the seating area. This was the least amount of leg room I’d encountered in recent memory, but if I worked at it, I could lean forward and wedge my knees into the slots between seats. I should mention that Mukul’s birthday was the night before, so the five of us (Carlos, Duli, Mukul, Tom, and I) planned to catch an important 1 ½ hours of sleep en route. I was just tired enough to doze off through my discomfort.
More painful than it looks
I gradually became aware that an announcement was taking an outrageously long time to complete. A minute into the Mandarin I opened my eyes, annoyed, and looked at Carlos. “I think they are reading the newspaper,” he said. The other three guys were waking up and thumbing through their Chinese dictionaries to figure out how to say “shut up.” But then the flight attendants appeared in the aisle and the real fun began. Calisthenics! Wrist exercises, stretching, clapping, the whole plane was joining in. We played along, agreed it was reasonably funny, and closed our eyes to go back to sleep.
Seriously
Duli can sleep through a lot
Not so fast. Now a flight attendant playing the role of auctioneer stood up and began barking into the intercom. People were buying things. Drinks, chips, sandwiches…razors, toys, nose hair trimmers. This went on for just about the duration of the trip. We were sure they could make a lot more money if only they would sell noise cancelling headphones.
Yes, I'll take one baseball bat, please
Needless to say, we didn’t get any sleep on the plane. But now the fun in Shanghai would begin.
Shanghai night life
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At least we were prepared to get no sleep on the flight home, and we made it back to our home sweet home at Motel 168 in Shijiazhuang, with plenty of time to relax before Tom and I present to our client tomorrow morning.
