Chris Drumgoole

Last night, Melanie and I returned from Hong Kong.  Had a great great time in Hong Kong!  Our flight was supposed to depart from HKG at 7:30PM, for an arrival around 10:30-10:50PM.

When we got to the airport, we noticed the flight was delayed to 8:10PM - we later found out, according to the pilot, the plane was late getting out of Shanghai due to weather.  This was fine as we could spend a bit more time in this great airport.

We eventually board the plane, but then the pilot gets on the intercom and tells us due to bad weather in Beijing, we’re not sure what time we can take off - we have to join some sort of “queue”.  Yes, I confirmed with some friends in Beijing that it was raining pretty hard.

An aside: my flight from Beijing to Hong Kong landed during a category T3 storm on wednesday, so I don’t know what all the commotion is!

Long story short (ok, there isn’t much more left to the story!), we finally took off around 10:15PM (2.75 hours late) and landed 1:20AM.  Then we had to endure the horrendously inefficient and horribly designed new-Terminal 3.

Weather Gods

It seems to me, and several of my other friends in Beijing, that it’s been raining a heck of a lot more this season than it has in the past years.  And, like automobile drivers, pilots and air traffic controls don’t seem to know what to do when it rains. (In fairness, rain in Beijing is a bit of an abnormal phenomenon, so it does catch us all off guard a bit).

Could it be the powers that be are causing it to rain a bit more than usual to help in the cleanup effort of the city before the Olympics?  Who knows. But it is something interesting to think about.

I have the best luck traveling

This is the 3rd time in as much as a month that my flight, TO Beijing, has been delayed due to Weather.

1. Shanghai Hongqiao to Beijing: Saturday, May 31- Original departure time: 9:55PM; actual ~11:15PM
2. Qingdao to Beijing: Friday, June 20 - Original departure time: 9:25PM; actual ~11:30PM
3. Hong Kong to Beijing: Monday, June 30 - Original departure time: 7:30PM; actual 10:15PM

My good friend, Dr. Bushwacker, was flying back from Shanghai Hongqiao last week, also an evening flight - his flight was delayed and delayed, until finally they canceled it and rescheduled him for the following day.

I went to Shanghai this weekend to attend a Toastmasters conference (District 85P Spring Conference), and of course, to cheer on 2 of my club’s members who competed in the District-level Evaluation and Speaking contests.  Sadly, they didn’t place.

As a good friend of mine recently move from Beijing to Shanghai, I decided to extend my trip by one day to spend Sunday with him (I was originally supposed to return to Beijing Saturday night).

Shanghai is nice!

This was my 4th time to Shanghai, and for some reason, I hated it the previous times I went.  This time was different, but I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s that I’m getting tired of Beijing after 5 years?

My return flight was scheduled to depart from Shanghai Hongqiao airport at 9:05PM Sunday night.  I get to the airport on time, we board on time.  Then the perser came on the intercom and told us our flight would be delayed 1 hour “due to bad weather in Beijing”.  Everyone sighs. People start getting up to get their books or music players from their overhead luggage.

Air China was nice enough to put on a movie (in English) that kept me busy…

After about an hour, the perser came on the intercom again, and regretted to inform us “that due to deteriorating weather in Beijing, we’ll be delayed even longer”!  I then decdied to check out just how much the weather in Beijing was deterioratin by SMSing friends in Beijing.  Pretty much, my friends thought I was nutts because the weather was actually fine.  It rained a bit earlier, but it was dry now.

These guys are pulling something!

I remember hearing from someone a while ago that there’s a law in China that if a plane is delayed more than X (I forgot what X was), then the airline would need to compensate  the passengers.  Clearly, this is a pro-passenger law.  But there are rumors that airlines, regardless of the problem, claim the delay is weather related so they can get out of compensating the passengers.  This allows time for the pilots to sober up or the engines to be fixed or whatever the case may be.

Any way, maybe half an hour later, the perser comes on again and says we’ll take off around 11:15PM.   Finally! Some good news!

We were pretty close to that estimate - we touched down around 1AM into the new Beijing Airport Terminal 3.  An improvement, but I wasn’t about to ooo and ahh at that hour (this was my first time actually traveling through this terminal).

Ok, story done.

I’m flying to Hong Kong today, Tuesday, February 5, and return next Monday, February 11.  I probably won’t post until I’m back… Unless, of course, I win a ton of money in Macau…

And let’s all welcome in the Year of the Rat!  Have a good one!

Well folks, I think I have out done myself this time.

Really…

As some of you may know, I had to make an unexpected trip to the U.S. for a funeral. Well, I am currently on my way back to China - I am at the Minneapolis airport waiting for my flight to Narita.

Well, on the way to the lounge, I found this neet ZoomSystems vending machine selling ipods, among other things. Here’s a photo I borrowed from anoither website, click on the image to go to that Website.

Just for fun, I went to it and played around with the touch screen interface. Hmm, they have iPod Touch’s. It sure would be nice to watch my videos on that nice 3.5″ screen instead of the smaller 2.5″, or whatever it is, that I have on my 5G iPod Video… Hmm, the 8GB model is US$279.99… I figured I could transfer my videos over between the two iPods during my almost 3 hour layover. The plan was perfect!

A quick impulsive credit card swipe later, I was the new proud owner of the iPod Touch. And because it wasn’t an iPhone, it wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have any nasty activation issues.

Ha!!

It turns out that this bloody thing REQUIRES you to “activate”, or initialize it using iTunes. And, of course, iTunes runs only on Windows and Mac.

The world is not fair for us freedom loving trouble makers…

Here’s a picture of my currently useless iPod Touch plugged into my old Appe PowerBook G4 running Ubuntu. Oh, the irony. I just had to have Linux on this thing, huh?

As you can see, it requests a connection to iTunes. Grrr…

So, I’m stuck not being able to use my new toy until AFTER my long flight - which was the main reason I bought it in the first place!

And here’s a random tidbit… For fun, I decided to scan the lounge for open bluetooth devices. Here’s a screenshot:

Steve is my phone, but it’s interesting to note the 3 computers with bluetooth and the 2 BlackBerrys. Is it normal for BlackBerry to have Bluetooth open? Maybe it’s those people with the stupid bluetooth ear pieces with the annoying “I’m Cool, But Not Really” blinking blue light…

Oh well, time to go to my plane…

Folks, I’ll be in the U.S. for most of next week: leaving early morning Saturday, January 26, and returning late evening, Thursday, January 31.

Even though this was a last minute, unexpected trip, I managed to get a relatively acceptable air ticket on Northwest Airlines - Round trip Beijing to Baltimore BWI (via Narita and Minneapolis), RMB 6,700 inclusive of tax.  Not to shabby.

And, I’ll be sharing the first leg to Narita with H.  We’re going to do a food experiment, where he gets the Kosher breakfast (there are Asian Jews, you know…) and I get the Muslim breakfast (no comment).

I suppose a good result of this trip, if there can be one, is the what was going to be a 9-day work week* (due to Chinese New Year) is now back down to a 5 day work week (Friday Feb 1 through Tuesday Feb 5) - I then fly to Hong Kong on the 6th.

Unfortunately, the Narita to Minneapolis, and return, flights are on the older 747’s, which means, us slaggers in the back (economy class) don’t get individual TV monitors.  ugh…

*Oh, to my friends who don’t know what is going on with the 9-day work week, Chinese New Year is a “Golden Wee” holiday, where we get 3 days off, plus the weekend, plus a shifted weekend, that results in a 7-day straight holiday.  The shifted weekend is made up either before of after the holiday.  In this case, we make it up on February 2 and 3.

Ok, I only took 3 photos… Here they are (click on them to see them in flickr)

I landed in Portland, Oregon in the early morning of Friday, 6:30AM to be exact. Immigration and Customs was a breeze. My next flight, to Las Vegas, isn’t until 7:15PM this evening.

So, I took the light rail downtown - will be meeting with an old college buddy who lives here (although not for long) for lunch. Right now, I’m killing time at a Border’s bookstore cafe on a 24-hour US$10 internet connection.  Stupid country with their non-free WIFI….

As I said, it’s Friday morning, and the city is quiet. I was expecting lots of activity: people going to work, getting their starbucks coffee, etc… But, I suppose that as Portland isn’t Chicago or NYC, (it’s much much smaller), there isn’t a whole lot of activity downtown any way… It’s a nice quiet city…

This is my second time coming to Portland - the first was last year (2006) in September. I was in the U.S. on a business trip with my former company (specifically Michigan and Texas), and decided to fly through Portland on the way back to China to see Matt (who I’m seeing today), his wife Joanne, and another good friend Loren, who unfortunately for me, no longer lives here. I liked the city last time - Loren took me to a nice microbrew… If you’re interested, have a look at my Portland flickr set. I’ll try to take some more photos today - if something looks interesting, that is.

Portland sort of reminds me of Seattle (Melanie and I went for the first time in October of this year), in that there are a lot of scruffy looking people here - I’m going out on a limb here and assume most of them are tree hugger types… I know many of them aren’t homeless bums as they are enjoying their US$4 Starbucks latte while chatting with friends on their Apple MacBooks, but why they choose to dress like bums is beyond me. I’ll ask my friend Matt when he finally gets downtown, maybe he has some insight. I remember last time I visited, he told me Portland, as well as most of the Pacific Northwest, tends to attract environmental-types…  Maybe because of the excessive logging in this area…  Or maybe environmental types like rain…

But hey, whatever floats their boats… Who am I to judge?  (Quiet!, those of you who know me…) But, regarding the “bumness”, maybe it’s a way to reduce the risk of getting mugged - if you look scruffy and poor, why would a thief bother you? Kind of like buying a 200 RMB local-brand bicycle in Beijing instead of the fancy 2,000 RMB Giant from Taiwan - everybody and their brother has a crappy bike - no need to steel yours… O.k., maybe this analogy is a bit far fetched… Anyone care to comment?

Any way, changing the subject so I won’t dig my hole any deeper… If it weren’t for the strange Oregon State law regarding gas pumps (it is ILLEGAL to pump your own gas in Oregon), I would add Portland to my “short list” of acceptable U.S. cities for living, should I ever decide to return…  The list is short…  This strange “law” sounds like a socialist strategy to reduce unemployment, you know, methods countries like China “employ” (no pun intended) to “hide” their unemployment.  Hmm, I’ll stop this subject right here because I’m not really sure where I’m going with this…

Great, Matt just called saying he’s getting on the train to come downtown soon - ETA: around an hour.  He lives out in Intel and sushi country - Hilsboro, you could say a suburb of Portland.  (I say Intel county because apparently Intel employs some 10,000 people in the area.  Who knew that chip designers were environmental types?)

Wow, this is actually a pretty long post… Maybe I’ll stop here.  You can thank me in the comments for not continuing on blabbering about nothing.  I’ll write a post tomorrow or Sunday about Las Vegas.

Over the weekend I finally got around to uploading my photos from Chicago and Seattle (that I took in October of this year.)

I was lazy and didn’t put any captions, but pictures speak a thousand words, right?

Chicago

Seattle

Enjoy. I’ve got Xiamen photos to upload at some point…

This post is several days late. Sorry.

I went to Shanghai on Sunday (Nov. 11) to attend a BCP (that’s Business Continuity Planning, for the 99.99999% of you who don’t know) conference. The conference lasted 2 days (Monday and Tuesday). Normally I’m not a huge fan of Shanghai, primarily for two reasons:

1. Shanghai people are generally rude. At least, more rude than Beijingers.
2. Shanghai is unacceptably expensive. We’re talking approaching prices you’d pay in Hong Kong or even Tokyo for a beer. (Maybe I just go to the wrong places…)

But I have nothing against the city itself (in terms of buildings, layout, etc.). But the airport… My god….
Hong Qiao is a joke

I’ve been to Shanghai 3 times. 5 of the 6 legs I went through Hong Qiao airport (the old one that is now pretty much dedicated to domestic flights). I flew out of Pudong (the new, International Airport) once. (An aside about Pudong: Reminds me of a bigger Beijing Airport Terminal 2 - large, grey, baron)

The main thing I don’t like about Hong Qiao (and I can’t comment on Pudong as I never arrived at Pudong) is the taxi queue. I arrive around 10pm or so Sunday night, and this is what I was greeted by:

That’s an overflowing taxi queue. This airport has one taxi queue. One.

It took 40 minutes to get through this dang thing. (Beijing’s airport had a disaster Taxi queue up until last year sometime when they overhauled it. They now split it into 3 or 4 queues, it moves much faster.)

God… 40 minutes to wait for a freaken taxi. Meanwhile, you’re crowded into this queue, people are smoking all over the place- you can’t breath….

“Enjoying Shanghai”

Shanghai was ok…

Getting Back

I had a 9pm flight Tuesday night back to Beijing. I, being paranoid about missing flights, managed to get to the airport around 7:15pm. I really didn’t want to wait for almost 2 hours so I tried to change my ticket to an earlier one. Lucky for me, there’s a new partnership with the 5 major airlines that fly between Beijing and Shanghai that makes it easy to switch flights, check in, claim baggage, etc. That’s the theory any way.

After being told to go to 4 different counters, I managed to get to a counter where somebody would help me. Long boreing story short, I got on a 7:55 pm flight. Sweet!

Whoa there son, slow down for a moment!

I got on a Hainan Airlines flight. I’ve never been on a Hainan airlines flight. These guys 2 years ago added a multiple-times-a-week direct flight Beijing to Budapest, so they must be legit, no?

Chinglish Prevails even at 30,000 feet

I rarely look at the emergency evacuation brochure as probably if we’d every need to use it, we’d be dead already. But for some reason, I decided to check it out. I just had to take a picture:

Ok, it’s a 737-800. And the title of this brochure is “Just In Case”. As my dutch friend said, this is the “Just In Case Special Edition of the 737-800″. Clever…

Airplane Food is Good!

Normally I don’t complain about airplane food. It’s not supposed to be gourmet. It’s supposed to take care of your hunger. Now, with this being an 8pm flight, I was expecting a somewhat-proper meal. Hey, I got on on my flight to shanghai on Air China… This is what they served:

Some grape tomatoes, a roll, a muffin, and pickled veggies (with 2 slices of some meat on top).

Needless to say I was still hungry… Oh, and to make matters worse, they don’t have beer on this flight. grrr.

Sick People Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Fly

And baby’s too! But I didn’t have any baby problems this time around. No no, it was much worse. My plane had a considerable number of, what I think were Eastern Europeans (or maybe East-Central?) - I couldn’t decipher what language they were speaking… Any way…

I was way in the back - I mean, the last seat. Right in front of the aft restroom and galley. One of these foreign guys was quite sick - Just after take off, he went to the restroom, and his friends, after a while, went to check on him. He eventually emerged, but he looked like shit. They had him sit on the other side of the aisle from me due to the close proximity to the restroom. I thought “crap…”.

Most of the flight, he looked o.k…. That changed as we started to descend. Minutes from touching ground, we hit a little bit of turbulence and he started shifting in his seat a lot. Eventually he decided to run to the restroom - at this point, the fasten your seat belts light was on, so of course the flight attendants went a bit nuts but eventually let him get into the restroom (thank you!). Moments later, he was vomiting with a lot of emotion (this is hard to explain in words… let’s just say most of the plane could hear!).

We touched down… On taxiing to the gate, he emerged from the restroom and sat in his seat. There was no further excitement from him.

I wonder what was wrong with him… Did he drink too much? Was it food poisoning? I just hope that won’t happen again - I consider myself lucky though as I wasn’t used as a projectile vomit target…

My holiday has begun. I left Beijing on Monday at 9am or so (well, actually our flight was delayed due to impenitence in the control tower) . I was pleasantly surprised to experience a super quick checking/immigration/security process - from taxi to lounge in under 15 minutes.

Luckily, the delay didn’t cause a problem in Tokyo for the connection.

I just arrived at Minneapolis airport and am waiting for my connecting flight to Chicago.

The flight from Tokyo was pretty crappy. Here’s why:

Alcohol not FREE

I fly Northwest, so as of sometime last year, no more free alcohol on any Intl flight to/from Japan. (That’s pretty much all their Asian routes.) On top of that, I totally forgot and didn’t change any money to USD or Yen - I only had RMB - and of course the flight from Tokyo to the U.S. only accepts Yen or USD. damn. Had to do it sober.

The negatives of an exit row seat

I normally get exit seats as they have lots of leg room. See this page for the seat map. My seat was 35B. So, the guy in 36A would often slip in between me and the door so he wouldn’t disturb his neighbors in 36B and C. Well genius, you disturbed me.

Oh, and the seat felt a bit slanted - i.e. not totally flat. So it was quite uncomfortable - that on top of the already slightly narrow design due to the tray table being located in the arm rest.

The stupid thing is, I sat in this seat once before (last year sometime) and experience similar shortcomings. I told myself never again. What did I do? I chose the dang seat again. So, word to the wise - don’t sit in that seat!

Asshole neighbors

The guy next to me in 35C was an American, mid to late 60’s. Real piece of work. That means, he’s annoying. Big time. You see, I decided to be social this time, as I usually sit in my seat and not say a word because I hate giving the whole “why I live in China story”. But, when he came to sit down (he was the last one on the plane as his connecting flight from Bangkok to Tokyo was late), he seemed like a nice guy, so I said”Hello”.

Hah. I learned my lesson. He immediately said “Hey, you’re a big guy, I don’t want to share my seat with ya - make sure you stay on your side.”. O.k., he said it in a slightly positive way, but, I’m sorry… You just don’t say shit like that. Period. So, I decided not to say a word to him the rest of the flight. Asshole.

As this was an exit row, the flight attendants have a bench to sit at during take off and landings. Well, Mr. A-Hole was pleasant to them, talking about what their travel schedules were, how long they’ve been with the airlines, etc.. You know, useless conversation points. He then proceeded to mention to them, in a comical way, what he told me about staying to my side of the seat. This guy’s a freaken comedian. I looked at him, smiled, then rolled my eyes and went back to watching whatever was on my ipod.

For the record, when he was asleep, I noticed he encroached on my side a few times. At that point, he reminded me of Senator Craig - you know the gay Senator (who claims he wasn’t propositioning the undercover police officer, and that no, he isn’t gay), coincidently in a men’s room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the very airport we were flying to. Must be something in the water?

Any way, from the eavesdropping I did, he apparently travels to Bangkok twice a year to see “friends”.  Sure… I bet he’s a sex tourist, probably one who targets underage lady-boys.  Sicko.

Done with that crap, for now…

Any way, my next flight is first class - free upgrade.  But, it’s only an hour, so…