Day 11 - Returning Home
Trip Start
Aug 08, 2006
1
13
14
Trip End
Aug 23, 2006
Portland,
Oregon,
United States
Thursday, August 24, 2006
The alarm goes off at 4:30 in the morning. The simple doorbell "ding-dong" of the PDA alarm is a slightly odd thing to wake up to. I can't remember the last time I actually heard a house doorbell sound like the "ding-dong" that was ever present in 50's sitcoms. But it's so ingrained into our psyche that ever time you hear it you think somebody is at the door, and as soon as you answer it, the fonz is going to come striding in. Ok, not really, but it defenitely hits some nerve in your brain that is different than other alarms. I suppose I could change it, but I've found that little morning twist in the head to be kinda fun on this trip.
It took a little bit to get moving this morning. My body was still recovering from the expenditure on the Great Wall yesterday. Muscle aches and sunburns among others. But all in all I'm feeling pretty good. Rebecca and I get back to packing. She did most of her's last night, miraculously fitting all of her stuff in her big hiking back and the red duffle that I brought my pack in. Oh, and her beat-to-hell Jansport daypack that she's been using for 2 years I think. I'm checking the 2 chinese suitcases that our blankets came in. We're stashing a bunch of our souveniers in all the nooks and crannies in and around the blankets. I get to work on that while Rebecca does all of her morning stuff. Then what is left is a pile of my clothes and my hiking pack. The phone rings... It's been an hour already and the cabbie is here. I hurredly stuff all my leftovers in my pack that will be my carry-on and we head out.
About an hour to the airport. Our last morning in Beijing. You can see the sun, but it's a dirty orange disk in the sky. The pollution is already bad today. Well, maybe not bad for Beijing, but bad for an Oregonian like me. In the cab, Rebecca neatly tears apart a loaf of chinese wheat bread with her fingernails. I didn't actually see it happen, but when I look over, there are a couple of pretty-neatly sliced pieces of bread in her lap and I think "where did she get a knife?" and she says "pretty good for just tearing with my nails, huh?" Dang this girl is adaptable.
She applies skippy-in-a-tube peanut butter to the pieces and spreads them around with the bottom end of a hotel disposable toothbrush. We decide against using jam since it's been unrefrigerated for the week and I mention the word "botchelism". So, no makeshift PB&J this morning, just PB&chinese sweet bread in the back of a cab. Not my ideal breakfast, but it's something in the stomach and Rebecca is happy with herself. Oh, I forgot to mention that we found these fruit-rollup type things at the Wu Mei market last night and decided to give them a try. We opened them with the PB sandwiches and both decided they are quite good. Thicker than your run-of-the mill fruit leather, but just about the same as the little fruit-leather pieces you find in health stores. And unexpectedly, they aren't all sugar. The sweet/sour balance is actually just about right. Quite good.
We get to the airport and just as we're getting out of the cab I realize there is something itching at the back of my head. An idea... Like we need to do something. Then I realize that the thought is to get-the-hell-in-line-quick beause it's like the entire Chinese olympic tryout team is milling around the taxi drop-off point of the airport. I don't really know if it's the olympic team, but it sure was a hell of a lot of athletes in matching workout suits. We didn't beat them in, so as we watched about 30 go by, they were all carrying tennis raquets. So I thought it might be something about tennis. Then I saw others inside, a couple of tall ones taking pictures with little kids... "Ok, that must be basketball?" Then a little later a bunch of smaller girls in different matching suits, these looked like gymnatics sweats, but the girl didn't look pre-teen enough to be chinese gymnasts. So I was thinking swimming or something else. I really don't know, but all together there must have been about 2-300 of them.
We both get through our baggage customs declarations in good time, then head out to check into our respective flights. Rebecca sends to me A area and I wait in line. Get to the end and the guy tells me "not here... Other side". So I go to the other side and it's to Kuala Lumpur, so I'm thinking that's not it. Then we find out that I can't even check in until 9:30, and Becca's flight leaves at 8:30, which means that I get to wait in the post-checkin, pre-security limbo for about 2 hours. After some chill time, Rebecca and I say our goodbyes for now. We've been together 24/7 for 11 days now and it's been great. We've had some minor disagreements, and some serious discussions about things that were not so pleasant, but I wouldn't give it up for anything. We have traveled really well together and this week has been an absolute blast. A realization of a several dreams really. So even though we're going to see each other again in 16 hours (maybe less) we still had to have a real goodbye, since we're going from side-by-side to solo for a little while.
With Rebecca sent off, I decided to try to find some real food, since flghts always make be naseous, eating on them never seems pleasant. But I realize to leave my current area means I gotta go through customs again. So never mind, I just sit on the floor and wait. Eventually a older gentleman on standby for the same flight parks by me and we strike up a conversation about China. He's retired and spends his life traveling around doing mission work now. He really likes China, but he hasn't been able to learn the language, so he's going back home to the states. His son was actually doing research work at OHSU (med school in Portland) but just got a job with the FDA to work on the avian bird flu somehow. Our conversation was interrupted when we realized they were checking our flight. Maybe I'll see him on the plane again.
I get in line for the security check, and I'm way at the back when I realize there is a small commotion up front around a very beautiful chinese girl standing at the immigration counter. She is eventually asked to step aside and she turns around and waits by a big post until somebody comes to take care of her issue. As she settles down to wait, I notice that swallow and momentary tightening of the face when somebody is really nervous about something. I wait all the way through the line, maybe 15 or 20 minutes, and when my time comes, I see that she is still standing there, but she seemed a lot more relaxed at that point. I started remembering all these stories about people disappearing in the night, or being denied anything and everything simply because of the whim of some government official. I couldn't help but wonder what would happen to her. If it was just some mixup or some bigger drama unfolding in front of me. Oh well, I'll never know.
I get to the baggage X-ray and send all that through, no problem. The guard mentions that he needs to open my bag, I say "Ok". Knowing I had nothng to hide. He opens up the top and digs around where the PDA is. I thought he might take issue with a high tech device. But that wasn't it. Then I helped him open the main compartment and he saw my ear muffs and asked... I tried to explain as best I could. Then he started digging around the bottom and it looked like he randomly feeling around for a second, but they it looked like he was really digging for something. Then he pulled out the little rattle-snake magnet thingies and showed them to me. And I said "Oh!" And I thought "Ok, I can see what I machine didn't like those" But then he said "You can't carry these on" and I said "OK" hoping he'd let me check them, but no luck. They were confiscated. Then I saw him turn to a screen next to the check area I was at and he had an X-ray view of my whole bag and when he clicked on the solid black double-oval shape on the screen, it was highlighted like the software had it seperated out already and he had to tell the system what it was in some little drop-down box. I wondered how many other things had been picked apart and already identified by the machine. As I was walking away, I saw him playing with the little magnets with his collegues. I'm kinda majorly bummed that I don't have those any more. I wanted to play with them some more and figure out what they were made of.
Not to make matters worse, but the whole time through this whole process, I was wearing my "green squishy neck-thing" as Rebecca calls it. It's full of those crystals that absorbe water and slowly leech it out over time. It's great for putting on top of sunburns. It keeps the area cool and moist. But, if you feel it, or even look at it, it looks like a green fabric tube filled with gel. Not once through the entire checking process did anybody ask about it or even look at it twice. So while I understand the desire for heightened security. The US department of homeland security still seems like a multi-million dollar joke to me. I'm just a plain civilian with no special equipment and defenitely no desire to hurt anybody. But when I know that I could get hazardous, dangerous or banned substances on a plane without even trying, it doesn't really make me feel very safe. Its like they don't even take it seriously. Maybe it's because I come from a techie/engineering industry, but the only way to truly know if something works is to test it, and then test it again, then test it in extreme circumstances, and keep testing it until you know it will perform as expected/advertised in the defined parameters. I really wonder if there is anybody out there whose job is to try to get stuff through airport security systems. If there isn't, there should be. If there isn't, it's a perfect place for an investigative journalist to blow a story wide open. It's not that don't want security on airline travel, it's just that I want _effective_ security on airline travel. And right now it seems like they are being terribly ineffective. I guess the way I see it, if you're going to be that ineffective, then why do it at all?
Still hungry and thirsty, I walked through the hallway of mass capitalism in the Beijing airport. Westernized crap everywhere in "duty-free" shops. And found a little café advertising "western food". I ordered a hamburger and fries, just see what would come out. The hamburger.... Well, I've had worse, but not by much. The fries were pretty damn good though. The whole package defenitely wasn't worth the $8.00 I paid for it, but it was better than airplane food.... Again, not by much.
20 minuter until I need to go check in. I'm going to try to sleep on the flight, it's like the only way I ever avoid the nasea....
