A Long Day Yesterday

Greeting from China!

I spent most of the day yesterday on the planes. First I asked a friend to drop me off at a local New Jersey Transit train station near where we live so I can take the train to Newark International Airport. Actually, it was the first time I took a train to the airport, so I have no idea how hard it could be when I also had to carry two pieces of luggage (my wife took the kids with her already).

Well, it turned out taking a train to the airport is very easy, even it was in the morning rush hours. The train first took me to Newark Penn Station where I transferred to another train on a different track. After only one stop, I got off the train at the airport station to take the Airtrain, a monorail connecting all three terminals of the airport. Ten minutes later, I was already checking in my luggage. Living 50 miles from the airport, I thought driving was the only option. Not so (since I don’t travel much, it took me until know to find out). The total time from leaving my home to arriving at the airport was less than two hours. Not bad at all. If I travel alone next time, I will just opt to take the train to the airport, instead of having my wife driving me there.

Then there came the hard part of this trip: the 13-hour flight from Newark to Beijing and the distance is longer, 7,292 miles, not 6,000 miles as I thought. We go back to China about every two years, but I never paid attention to the distance before. And before the only direct flight to China we had was from JFK in New York, until Continental won the right to serve this route three years ago. I heard that Continental is also bidding to provide daily direct flight from Newark to Shanghai. If it wins, it will save us a lot of time.  Airliners are reducing domestic flights lately to save money (and charge extra fees for every checked in baggage), but they are not cutting back flights to China. With a large Chinese community in this area (maybe the largest in the nation?), direct flight to China is a lucrative business. The plane is always full!

While I was waiting to board, I took this picture of the plane which was going to take me to Beijing.

And on the plane, I shoot this picture of the flight map. Instead of going west, the plane went north, going through Canada, Greenland, Russia, and Mongolia, before landing at Beijing Capital International Airport at 2:05 pm on September 24, local time (there’s a 12-hour time difference between east cost and China). While the Olympics was gone (the Paralympics also ended last week), the signs are still everywhere.

Then after waiting another two hours at the airport, I was on a China Eastern Airlines plane to go to Lanzhou in the northwest of China to meet my wife and children. That’s another two-hour flight.

Things have changed a lot in China. I remember when I was a college student more than 20 years ago, I had to travel nearly 40 hours by train to go home, which was some 2,000 kilometers away, during the spring and summer breaks and it was lucky to just have a seat on the train. Travel by air was rare back then and most people (including me of course) couldn’t afford it. Now the one-way ticket to Lanzhou, about 750 miles from Beijing, is about RMB 1,800, or around $250. Still not that cheap, but many are now choosing planes and that’s why I bought a few shares of China Southern Airlines (ZNH) early this year

On the plane to Beijing, I was sitting next to an American couple. They told me this is their first time to China. They will stay in Beijing for a few days, then go to Tibet. I have never been to Tibet before. Maybe I should. Some days

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