When Ears Explode

So I went to England and France over Christmas.

It was a lot of fun despite the ridiculous flights.

A quick word about the flight from Japan:

We went to Europe with Tianjin Airlines (I think).  They flew us from Haneda to somewhere in China, where we disembarked having all our stuff x-rayed (along with us) before we reached the baggage area.  We proceeded to pick up all our bags, walk around to departures, then go through the rigmarole.

We were then x-rayed again, along with all our stuff.  We're up to three scannings at this point.

We got on the second plane and flew to somewhere else in China for what was advertised as a 'technical stop.'  My understanding of a technical stop was similar to the scene in Airplane! where a crew kick the tyres, clean the windscreen and 'fill 'er up.'

This is not the case.  We were ordered off the plane, through more x-rays (4) and immediately shuffled back onto the plane.  As far as I can tell we neither gained nor lost passengers.  An interesting side-note.  As we were walking to be scanned there was an empty, unattended scanning machine with its conveyor running.  Everyone was putting all their shit on this scanner, some were taking off their shoes and whatnot in preparation.

The catch was that there were no officials to be seen at this particular point, so I just walked past and onto the escalator.  Downstairs held the actual border guard and all their scanning equipment, so some people were potentially up to 5 scannings (I don't think the machine was even turned on).

We were shuffled back onto the same plane we were kicked off, then proceeded to fly to Europe.

I think this technical stop was for refuelling, but I don't know why they kicked us off.  The plane was not cleaned as far as I can tell.  I assume it's just the psychology of making everyone get up and piss about for an hour to ensure no one gets cabin fever, or starts complaining or something stupid.  I would much rather be left alone, asleep, in my seat though.

The food was hilariously bad.  I enjoyed it for the novelty factor, which is something I don't usually do.  Ironically liking stuff is the trend among people who would like to hide the fact that they enjoy objectively terrible things.  Like bad movies, rubbish music or Harry Potter.

The reason I enjoyed it?  Until this point I had often wondered what prison food was like.  Now I know. 

The flight from Japan to China had the attendants just throw down a small pack of crackers in a red packet.  Of course red.  There was no drink.  I think they forgot, or maybe they ran out.  Who knows.

It's not really dark to make an artistic statement about my view of the food - they just left the lights off for feeding time.  Presumably so we couldn't see what we were consuming.

The subsequent flights were hot food, on a tray even.  High fallutin' stuff.

It was very hot.

The foil was in the shape of the food holding pot thing, but was not actually secured.  It led me to wonder whether they were saving money by reusing the foil.  It was only gently placed on top of the container, the mere suggestion of cleanliness.  Nothing so gauche as crimping.  Presumably they do this at the factory and not on board, although the crew were strangely absent for most of the flight...

The orange things were food.  They were kind of crunchy.  Maybe carrots?  Maybe melon?  They were sort of dry, crunchy, entirely devoid of flavour.

The tissue packets were printed with 'welcome to this flight,' which was nice, but I could not help feeling that 'motherfucker,' was implied at either the beginning or end of that sentence, what with the abject lack of full stops or capital letters.


A quick note on chinese immigration.  They are, as you would expect, arseholes.  At every stop of the way they push, shove and shout at you for no apparent reason.  I don't know whether it was because our flight was coming from Japan, but at every given opportunity I was fingered by their security guards, shouted at for having a mostly empty bag and pushed into the wrong queues.  I suspect any non chinese visitor will get this treatment, but they are all horrible people.  I looked into the eyes of one of the 'organisers,' and saw the fires of hell.  I looked into the eyes of one of the men sitting at the scanning machine and saw a pit of despair I had only previously seen in fellow teachers.

A second note - when we left the plane in London, it looked like someone had left a window open.  The place was absolute chaos.  Chinese travellers are world-renowned for being disgusting, but the absolute filth the cleaning crew were been greeted with is utterly mind boggling.  I should have taken a picture but I was too tired to think of it at the time.

You could not walk a single metre without kicking wrappers and bottles.  Every chair had headphones thrown about them, discarded at the whim of their users.  Blankets were all over the place.  It turns out that the Chinese earn their reputation and reinforce their stereotypes at every given opportunity. 

There did not appear to be any fecal matter in the aisles, which is something to be thankful for.

After all this, I feel it appropriate to write a summary review for your consideration.

The food was comical.  The staff were acceptably bland.  The plane was a relic.  The trip time was actually decent.  The airports varied from dingy communist terror hole, to cutting edge touch screen zero personality cut and paste ultra modern boringness.

Would I fly with them again?  Absolutely.  Not only were they the cheapest by a stretch, they offer an experience like no other.  They are the airline embodiment of the Shakespearean comitragedy (sic).  From the 1960's plane interiors, to the gruelling immigration experience, nothing about the flight was dull.  Everything was something I have never experienced before.  In a world of unrelenting homogeneity there are few places to see the abutting of so many conflicting systems, from analogue/digital to communist/capitalist.

Rating:  0/10 and 10/10


(I ended up writing way more about this than I though, I'll have to save photos and stuff for another time.)