china: day zero

We flew from Omaha to Xi'an today. The first three legs of the flight went without a hitch: Omaha to Denver, Denver to San Francisco, and San Francisco to Beijing. The international flight was pleasant, and, strange as it sounds, the food was fantastic. The crew served a beef noodle dish that was on par with the ones Noodles and Company makes.

The fun started on landing in Beijing. The Chinese authorities are absolutely paranoid about swine flu. Every passenger on that flight was required to fill out a form with information about temperature, symptoms, cities visited in the last week, and whether or not that passenger had "contact with pig" recently. We then formed a line (incidentally, the Chinese are really bad at queues--leave more than a hand's breadth between you and the person in front of you, and someone will cut in line) to be photographed by infrared fever-sniffing cameras. One student was running a fever after receiving a tetanus shot in the last week; she was detained for ten precious minutes of our short layover. We then went through customs and a second round of infrared cameras before being told that our checked luggage had arrived here and would need to be checked again. Next, we took a train to the domestic flights concourse--to find that there's no security bypass between international arrivals and domestic departures. We went through security. Again.

We did, however, make the flight to Xi'an. The moral of the story? Get a long layover at the first airport in each country if possible.