Take Off & Landing
The Friday before our Beijing trip was our only short day we had at China. Fortunately for us, there were celebrations and drinks in the Brisbane office to commemorate some of our contractors leaving, so not much work was being done back home anyway. Also, as we are one team, just distributed, we purchased drinks and snacks (chicken’s feet etc) here so we could join in the festivities.
j-street & I tried to teach some of the guys here how to play beer ping pong. This is not to be confused with beer pong, a completely different game. This was simply just ping pong with a drink in one of your hands. Even though they had never played before, they still managed to beat us with ease.
We got to the airport in the mid afternoon to get on our flight to Beijing. Getting our boarding passes was relatively painless, but as I was going through security, I triggered the metal detector. That resulted in another pat down, my second one this trip. As j-street says, “They aren’t shy here”, and they do a very thorough job.
The plane was slightly better than Dragonair, it had some food & entertainment. Food was pretty yummy and hot, you could ask for extra chilli which they just spoon into a cup and give it to you. When the entertainment screen came on, I thought it was an advertisement for 7-eleven but it just never ended. Eventually we figured out it was a Hong Kong (?) movie about some super heroes. It was incredibly difficult to follow, looking down at your food then back at your screen and suddenly one of the characters are killed of and there are 3 new ones.
As far as I could figure out there were 8 immortal people and 7 of them didn’t know they were because the 8th (who is both a female and male) keeps killing them and that wipes their memory. The seven immortals find out again and start a band to keep their identity secret and then they become super heroes saving everyone. However the get defeated again by the androgynous baddy, but one of them had fallen in love with him/her (not knowing that he is the baddy) so before they got reincarnated and lose their memory they turned into butterflies and went into the body of the 8th where they literally cleaned it with sponges and mops. This wasn’t enough, so the one that loved the baddy went to the heart and whispered some nice stuff which made the 8th have an epiphany while he was killing some guy so he ended up kissing him. Eventually he asked god to un-kill the 7 that he just killed and to wipe his own memory. So the girl that loved this guy got together, and they all lived happily ever after. Easy to follow huh?
Once we arrived in Beijing we hopped onto the airport subway. Everything was incredibly easy to use, even for foreigners. The only funny thing was a machine that said coins only actually only took notes and pressing Yes for a receipt didn’t print one. We arrived in our suburb and decided to walk to where we were staying, the Red Hotel…
About the Author
Mannan
Mannan is a software engineering enthusiast and has been madly coding since 2002. When he isn't coding he loves to travel, so you will find both of these topics on this blog.