It
got worse. It is now well into my
twenty-fifth hour or so in Guilin.
I never used to have anything, whatsoever against Guilin. It will now take a lottery
winning moment or some other remarkable windfall to erase the pungent ass-wart
that my mind will conjure as a result of these twenty-five hours spent here.
When last we spoke I was in a hotel in Guilin, blithely
noting this and that compromise.
Shortly thereafter my roommate and sixty other hapless travelers piled
into a bus and shot off to the airport.
I was communicating with a colleague as I recall about whether or not I
would make it to Hong Kong by 5:00PM.
It is now 9:22PM. I am
still in Guilin.
It all seemed rather reasonable, (as my onward destination
does to me now), the departure time was to be 2:00PM. I settled in to bad coffee and worse instant noodles at the
Guilin airport lounge and waited.
At 2:00PM we were told to board the plane. This is about the only intelligible thing we had been told,
since we heard “Ladies and Gentlemen, this flight is canceled.”
I needn’t belabor it.
You can tell how this will end.
We got on the plane. Waited
an hour and then got a message that the plane was somehow having mechanical
problems. At this point I began to
worry first that other passengers would begin to tear the seats out. My moment would come. We waited another hour and were told to
get off. Departing I told the
staff, who’d looked so professional and glad to see us, only sixty-three
minutes ago, that it wasn’t their fault but that the pilot should
apologize. As if on cue the pilot
opened the door, I repeated my suggestion and he immediately apologized, which
wasn’t at all satisfying.
Back in the boarding area we were trapped in the “already
passed immigration” nether-zone and forced to wait, with no news. I got increasingly furious along with
everyone else, stomped around, shouted aimless inquiries to people who were
powerless, strode up to immigration authorities and demanded things that that
they couldn’t abide. A crowd was at the gate door, 跌脚捶胸[1] with two hapless staff.
The girl in the lounge had the number for the “person at Air
China in charge.” I called
him. He made the mistake of saying
“he didn’t have free time to address this” and I flipped out. After yelling a while I decided to give
his number to about a dozen other angry people over at mob central where I kept
walking back to every few minutes.
A gerbil pacing back and forth I tried travel services, my wife, friends,
and eventually discerned that the best course of action was to cajole my way
out passed immigration and buy a new ticket elsewhere. After an exhausting discussion with the
lads from boarder control, I was allowed to exit. At no point during all this did Air China offer anything
intelligent to say other than, “we don’t know.”
I opted to simply pursue a direct ticket to my next
destination city Shenzhen. CTRIP
the China online travel service would not serve me as I was without a domestic
Chinese credit card for flight within a twenty-four hour period. Many, many
other things could have gone wrong but didn’t and before long I had a new
ticket to Shenzhen from the counter outside and paused to consider how best to spend the next seven hours here Guilin International.
I bumped into
one hapless French woman with a young boy in tow, who couldn’t access cash and
was denied use of a credit card. I
thought of all the times I’ve traveled with kids and imagined what a
considerably deeper gargle with a cucumber day this would have been if my
children had been with me. I
paused to help her in any way I could, mostly negotiating with frustrated
functionaries. Eventually, we got
her a ticket and she was on her way, as well.
Now it is 9:39PM.
Yet another stride pianist whom I’d never heard of is trying his best to
cool me down. “Anitra’s Dance” by
Donald Lambert recorded around 1951 is beginning to move me on, warm, live,
determined. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Lambert I’ve just under two
more hours to kill, here in the Guilin International Airport. Is it just me or is the Guiyang
waitress here at the airport restaurant exceptionally polite. This too, is helping.
I confess to you tender reader, if I strut out on to the
tarmac one more time in this globe-spin to find that a flight is cancelled or a
plane is malfunctioning or inclement weather is limiting options, I may go the
way of our friend the U.S. Postal worker . . . May this confessional serve as Exhibit A; said gent, boarded the plane with a
clear, head, and without specific malice aforethought, prepared for and
expecting the worse, but full of hope, nonetheless that his time in Guilin was now properly winding down.
[1] diējiǎochuíxiōng: lit. stamping and beating the chest
(idiom); fig. angry or stressed about something.
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