Greetings from China I

OK, here I am....at the Beijing airport after 9 hours of flight.... I have only about 40 minutes to catch my next plane but this should be fine. When I booked my flight to Hangzhou I first got a connection to have my layover in Shanghai, but then I would have had to change airports! Not gates, airports!and since I have never been in China before I was happy to pay 50 € more to switch planes in Beijing, with arrival and departure at the same airport ;).

Besides booking my flight the only thing I had to do was applying for a Visa….no biggy, everything else is organized by the company. I get a service apartment provided, they send a driver to pick me up from the airport, easy J. You know I even get paid, which most of my fellow students who stay in Sweden can’t say about their internships so which one is the developing country? ;)

So far it looks just like Europe, well the airport looks like any other airport :p…I follow the signs that say “transits” and find myself in a massive queue. Not only that my watch says 20 minutes until boarding but also the fact that I am the only person without luggage starts to stress me out. Why the hell does everybody have their luggage with them? The Air China guy at the airport in Frankfurt did not say anything about that and even though I am flying quite frequently they always sent my suitcase to the final destination. Nevertheless I decide to check the belt and see if my suitcase has arrived…nothing….15 minutes left…I go up to a guy that looks like he is German and ask him if I need to wait for my luggage. The next 5 minutes I get 20 years of China traveling experience from three different guys with the same answer: They have no idea….you never know….

Ok what now, wait for the suitcase that might not even arrive or catch my flight? I go for the flight and hope that the suitcase will arrive eventually, hopefully ;)

On the plane to Hang Zhou I am the only person who is obviously not Asian. The staff seams nervous and exited to talk to me but when asked if I want Chinese or Western food I go for Chinese. I’m going to China and I want to experience the real deal so I better start now. In Sweden it is 00.00 o’clock, in China it is breakfast time. When I open the typical airplane food aluminium container I find a white jelly like something. Besides that there is some vacuum packed stripes that look like some sort of vegetable and a soft brown egg thingy with a comic chicken on the plastic package smiling at me.  I try the white jelly mouse but it tastes like nothing….maybe it has a slight flavour of paper. Irritated about how to eat this I try to observe the Chinese people around me and discover with surprise that they all enjoy a croissant with jam and orange juice….western food is obviously more in trend.

When I get to the airport in Hangzhou I did not even expect my suitcase to arrive anymore. However I go to the belt but nope, there are about 10 suitcases on the belt but not mine. 10 suitcases? Why is nobody traveling with luggage? The lost baggage guy copies my passport and I put down the address of the service apartment I got. He also wants to have my phone number but I only have my Swedish prepaid card in my phone….without any credit…. I heard that my office works every second Saturday as well so I just hope that this Saturday would be one of them and write down the number of the person (I have no idea if it is a man or a woman) I had email contact with. But when I get into the arrival hall there is a super nice girl waiting for me. We go pretty much straight into the city center, get incredibly good food and do a boat trip on the West lake with a beautiful view on the mountains on the other side of the lake. By the time I get home that day my suitcase is already waiting for me in our apartment. Now I am here for almost one week and nothing has changed. At the beginning you don’t really know what to expect and what will happen next. You are a bit insecure and some things get messed up, but in the end everything turns out fine J.