World’s Windiest Airport?

The child behind me cannot keep from kicking the seat.  I have shot menacing glances to the woman I assume is the mother sitting next to her.  I have asked in polite Chinese: “little friend, please stop kicking the seat.”   The child obviously doesn’t get it.  The kicking has continued intermittently.  I know what its like to travel with a kid or two.  Sometimes kids take care of themselves, so you let them go, as it means they are not kicking you. 

This flight had some pretty intense turbulence.  So did the flight into Guiyang.  The world’s windiest airport?  We went way up high over the cloud cover and began to shake violently, we dropped back down to the clouds and began shaking.  The insistence to close my computer came sooner than I thought. 

Spending the flight being jostled by wind gusts and kicked at by a young lady, and dazzled by eloquently dissatisfied William Gass and his essays concerning biographies of Ezra Pound, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Frederic Nietzsche. He seems to poke and thrust at his subject.  I don’t usually have the window seat and I was feeling uneasy watching how violently the wing was flapping around out there.  Would I scream bloody murder if I saw the far end rip off?

The Air China lunch box had a oozy tofu dish in a plastic wrapping that you could cut and slide into your rice and chicken dish.  I ignored the bun, as I would anywhere but most assuredly in a culture that never baked.  At the bottom was a thin packet of something.  I couldn’t make out much from the cover beyond happy girl dressed in a Daizu outfit and that it was a “Guizhou Special Food”   It turned out to be an greasy, gristly pepper paste that radically improved my chicken. 

I’m laughing with my cabby.  I haven’t had a gut laugh with a cabby in a while.  I told him that this morning I was in Guiyang.  The local cabby was complaining about the traffic.  I said:  "I’m not afraid of your Guiyang traffic.  I’m from Beijing.  It can’t be anywhere near as bad."   My cabby this evening explained that our traffic tonight is because it is shuang yi jie  or Double One Day for 11/11.  All the lonely people are supposed to spend money for their special other person, and it has set new records for on line spending every year.  I laughed again that we were too old to be particularly concerned.  I wished him a “romantic” evening as we parted.