This morning, the hotel failed to give us our wake up call, and were thankfully saved by Miao’s phone alarm that she’d set last night. We’d packed up all the stuff we had last night, so all we needed to do was get dressed and zip the suit cases up.
Leaving the hotel via bus and crazy driver in the dark night was a bit of an experience, but this is China and to be expected. We arrived at Beijing Airport terminal 3 after having dropped some other hotel residents at terminal 2.
I was a little surprised to see an already quite estalished queue for the Emirates check-in desk. Checkin was no problem at all, we asked about our luggage, and the woman put it through to be forwarded to London Heathrow with us. We asked about customs and immigration at Dubai where we would get a connecting flight and of course we needn’t go out and come back in again.
We moved on to security, but first there was a train to get to the terminal which took only a few minutes. Here we met a Chinese family who was going to England on the same flights as us and have been nodding aquaintences throughtout the day.
We left the little train and walked through the quaranteen checkpoint with heat sensing cameras to detect whether you have a fever or not. This for us was pretty useless as the 2 female guards on duty were both asleep at their post.
Next was immigration, where I took a couple of pictures, and was noticed by the on duty guard and told to delete them, to my embarrasment. I had a good picture of the two sleeping guards which he told me to delete.
The immigration officer was a little slow to accept my fat face on the passport photo was actually me. After a while checking which visa was correct (he seemed to be a little confused with how many I had as I have 4 visa pages in total), he scanned the RFID chip on the passport and doing who knows what else, he finally accepted who I was. Having stamped my residency visa and departure card which I’d kept from last time I arrived, he let me through to leave China.
Onto the metal detector. I thought I’d clevely got everything metal out of my pockets and into my bag. I had howevever completely forgoten about my watch, and my camera perched on my belt. I felt right foolish, cause unlike Heathrow where you spend forever in a queue, the checks I’ve had in China are super fast. I didn’t had the time I’m used to, to prepare getting checked, even though I knew it would be fast, I was just rushing.
We had a walk around the inside of the terminal, in which there are no ATMS. Last time I was there, I really wanted to take some more money out to spend some of it, so I think they’re missing a trick, although I bet there’s a reason I’m missing.
The vast majority of the shops were closed, and in the 1 that was open, we weren’t prepared to spend the money on the inevitably small coffee that we’d get. So we found the gate and waited for the flight.
They called the passengers by sections, and not everybody understood what that meant, so lots of people got knocked back. They called people from the back of the plane forwards (excluding business and first classes) which makes alot of sense, so that people aren’t held up in the aisle for people putting luggage in the over head compartments.
The flight was uneventful, the food lived up to the standard plane food, and the entertainment system was like TV Channels so that you couldn’t pause/restart/resume etc the same as on one of my previous flights to China. There was coffee, tea, red and white wine, beer, whisky all to be had, and I partook in a couple small bottle’s of wine over the 7hr journey to Dubai.
When we landed in Dubai, we had to go through a security check again, even though we were transfering flights. We led the Chinese family we’d previously met through the transfer secutity stage and pointed them towards the right boarding gate.
The shops here were all very open and doing business. The currency was all marked in AED (Arabic Emirate Dollars I’m guessing), we didn’t want to be charge something exhorbitant on a credit card.
Dubai to London
This leg of the trip was shorter than the one from Beijing, but according to the in flight magasine the 2 sets of videos would be shown, just the same as the previous, so nothing lost there.
Near the gate was a branded (I think sony) power station for me to plug in my laptop into. I was just getting my EEEPC and power adapter out when the call to board came. This was an hour before the flight was set to leave, and surprised us both. I hustled Miao to get ready and get into the queue with me, and discoverd that getting through the gate lead to another waiting area and not onto the plane, missing any opportunity at use of the power socket.
However at this point, I opened up my laptop anyway to write a blog entry to find there was access to a free wireless internet point. I checked my emails to find that Mother had emailed me to say that Dad would pick me up from the airport, as opposed to getting the train home, saving us much hastle and time getting through London to Euston and buying railcards/tickets etc.
I then emailed her back and logged into twitter, discovered that my sister had recently been on, and direct messaged her to tell my mum that I’d recieved the message and we’d call dad when we got into the airport. She messaged me back to let us know that the message had been recieved. What a useful use of technology I thought and it cost us no money whatsoever.
I had a little chat with Li Ming on google talk, one of my Chinese friends, and told him that if he wanted us to buy anything for him in England, he was just to let him know. I gave him webaddresses for Amazon, Scan, Aria, and Novatech, which are all shops I use myself. I reminded him that we didn’t have much money available in England, so not to choose anything too expensive
At this point, the various sections of the plane were getting called to board the plane. We were quite near the front of the plane, so we were some of the last to be called, as they filled the plane from the back going forward in order to avoid the congestion of people filling the overhead lockers.
Unlike the previous plane, the window seats were banks of three rather than 2, and We had the rather dubious pleasure of sitting next to a large family mother, babe in arms, and lots of kids. This turned out not to be such an issue, but I was not initially looking forward to sitting next to a hyper active kid, as Miao was sitting in the window seat.
The advantage however, of this plane was that it was newer and had a power socket that was compatible with my laptop. 
This was the point I wrote most of the above blog entries. The entertainment system, unlike the last plane, was entirely customizable, and you could play, pause, rewind and generally choose whatever you liked. This suited us both much better than the TV like nature of the previous one.
The choice of meals we had here were either British or Arab, with an afternoon tea being the second of the two meals given to us on this leg.
GD Star Rating
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GD Star Rating
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