We arrive in Beijing at 2:00 in the afternoon, the first leg of our solar eclipse ’09 journey. We made our way by car to the port city of Tianjin. The Beijing airport has changed a great deal since we were there in 2004, and everything looked sparkling and new. Beijing had to put on a happy face for the hoards of foreign tourists invading for the 2008 Olympics, and the airport improvements were evidently part of the package.
I was most impressed with how shiny and clean the floors were. There seemed to be numerous maintenance people, all wearing surgical masks, methodically cleaning the floors throughout the airport. Someone in China must have perfected the formula for floor wax, because at times I was convinced it was wet, but it was just so shiny you could see your pores in it.
We had been concerned that we might not make it through quarantine, since the Chinese government has cracked down on North American flights into the country due to concerns over the Swine Flu. We had heard horror stories of people going into Beijing and being quarantined for a week in a hotel. We had heard that not only the people who had the virus, but anyone with a fever, or anyone within 3 rows of anyone with a fever, would be quarantined. We were told on the flight to remain seated when we landed, and wait for a Chinese health official to board and take everyone’s temperature. I expected this to be a long and tedious affair, if it were anything like my attempts to wrestle a thermometer into Alex’s mouth.
The Chinese, however, have perfected the art of auto-temperature taking, and before we knew it, a young Chinese man in a crisp white uniform jogged up one aisle waving a wand, and jogged back down the other and headed out the door. We were warned, in English, to stay seated until the plane was cleared. The next announcement was in Chinese, and this time, all the Chinese passengers all got up in unison and started wrangling their bags from the overhead bins. We waited a beat for an English announcement, which never came, so we followed suit. When in Rome, so to speak.
We had pass through two more health inspection aisles on the way to baggage claim, which of course, made me sweat profusely. It wasn’t the fear of being quarantined or Swine Flu or any other illness, real or imagined; it was the 97 degree temperatures with 98% humidity that did me in. Luckily, perspiration doesn’t show up on the infrared monitors, so we walked through without incident.
Frank had also read that the Chinese customs officials checked for people bringing contraband cheese into the country, so we made sure to avoid the cheese-sniffing dogs. I referred to this as the Policy of Lactose Intolerance and really wanted to start shouting “Free the Brie!” but I managed to control myself through Customs.
The hotel sent a driver to meet us, and we were relieved to finally see a sign with Frank’s name on it amid a sea of faces and similar signs at the arrivals gate. Alex called the car they sent for us was an “amazing limousine,” which was, in reality, a Buick minivan.
En route, we took a wide, impossibly clean toll road where we appeared to be the only car for several miles. This was puzzling to me, since China is a country of 1.3 billion people, you would think a few of them would be traveling this road on a Friday morning. We noticed that the tolls were quite steep, so that may be the deterrent for using the road. Frank mentioned that the road from Tianjin to Beijing was built specifically for the Olympics, since some of the events were held in Tianjin. The tolls were more than most people could afford, so the only vehicles that use it are taxis and trucks. It was a long and lonely rode from Beijing to Tianjin.
