In LA

Note: This post was written yesterday while I was waiting at the airport for a flight. I was in an irrationally foul mood, though much less foul than it sounds in writing –it’s just fun to grumble. I acknowledge that arriving to the airport early for a flight is immeasurably preferable to arriving at an airport late, that the average sane person would have been content to sit at the airport and attempt to read a Dale Carnegie business book in Chinese, and that my rant is a bit on the silly side. But as someone who is more accustomed to operating on “Jewish time” I was annoyed by the fact that we arrived at the airport far far too early for my tastes. (As an aside, do other cultures jokingly refer to lateness as “Polish time”, “Mexican time”, “Zoroastrian time” etc? Is this a Jew-specific in-joke?). On with the post…

Today, I had to catch a 6:30 PM flight from Lanzhou to Beijing. That sounds simple, doesn’t it? The drive to the Lanzhou airport from the hotel in Liancheng is a little over two hours, the airport is neither big nor busy, and it’s a domestic flight. To arrive 1 hour in advance would leave plenty of time. But did I hear someone say in Chinese that the car would leave at 2 PM? This seemed a little early to me, but maybe I was to share the car with people leaving on a 5 PM flight.

So around 1:05 PM I was out in a nearby village buying a wonderfully ugly duffel bag sporting a “Nike” logo in which to store some of my overflow luggage. My cell phone rang and played the Pac Man theme, which was not a familiar tune to the elderly Chinese gentleman perpetually standing next to me staring while I looked at some fashionable solid-dark-green canvas Converse All-Star style sneakers with the logo of the nearby power plant imprinted on the ankle. It was the Chinese production office on the line, calling to see where I was because the car was waiting for me. Apparently we were supposed to leave at 1PM!

I ran back to the hotel, passing butcher shops, motorcycles with live sheep tied on the back, outhouses, townfolk shoveling huge mounds of coal, crossing the bridge and sluice-gates over the partly-frozen river, and trying not to breathe in the occasional snowflake that might possibly be impregnated with a chemical byproduct of whatever was in the smoke released by the local power plant. This took 20 minutes. I then ran to my room, packed (breaking one zipper on the “Nike” bag), and ran down to the waiting car. We probably left around 1:35 PM.

We raced to the airport in the finest of thin off-white Chinese vans. I sat in the front seat, and took advantage of the fact that it had the only functional seat-belt. While near Liancheng, the driver sped, swerved around vehicles, drove in the left lane, and honked frequently. He honked at schoolchildren on bicycles, old people walking on the side of the road, other cars that didn’t pull onto the shoulder to let him pass, and large trucks. The windshield was so completely covered with dirt that I was impressed he could see enough of the road to navigate. Occasionally he would open his window to spit or toss the remains of a cigarette. I knew this driver. The last time I’d driven with him he’d gone at insane speeds down dark country roads as if he were playing a video game and had a few extra lives saved up. That time I’d asked him to slow down.

Eventually we made it to the toll freeway, which was nice and clear. I finished a bottle of water and placed it in the center console’s cup holder. A few minutes later the driver noticed it, opened his window, and threw the bottle out into the center of the road as we sped along. I didn’t hear it bounce. He threw his bottle a few minutes later. That’d be a $500 fine in the U.S., but since this is the industrial center of China, maybe that bottle is now the least harmful bit of matter in its vicinity. I talked a little with my fellow passengers, all Chinese members of the film crew, and as it turns out we were all on the same 6:30 PM flight to Beijing.

We arrived at the airport at 4:00PM. My co-passengers acted as if we needed to rush, so there was no stopping at the overpriced Lanzhou airport café. We loaded our bags onto carts, hurried into the airport, and by 4:15 we were checked in and at our gate. Since I’d missed breakfast, I bought a bowl of instant noodles. We all sat down in the completely empty section of the airport to wait for almost 2 hours before boarding the plane.

I know it’s good to get to the airport on time for a flight, but this seems insane to me. If I hadn’t been “late”, we’d have all arrived 3 hours before the flight. As it is, my co-passengers sat there futzing with their cell phones, while I typed (this post) on my computer, while we all waited at the gate for two hours. I could have used that time back at the hotel to do work, rest, make finger-paintings –the point is none of us needed to be at the airport that early. We could have worked 80% of a workday and left at 3 PM.

The other passengers tell me that I can share a car with them once we arrive in Beijing since we’re travelling in the same direction. Sounds good. As long as we land in Beijing two-and-a-half hours before the car is supposed to pick us up we should be fine.

As it turns out, we were picked up by a friend of one of the passengers, who gave me a very nice ride home.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 11:52 am and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.