Ah, Beijing

We arrive exhausted and wrinkled in a city made completely invisible by a shroud of haze. Smokers in the airport at every corner. Nowhere is there not a crowd. Our connecting flight to Mongolia is scheduled to leave in seven hours and we decide to head for the gate now and maybe settle in, sleep in shifts. I ask a security guard where the international transfers need to go, and she points to a giant sign in front of me that reads, “International Transfers.” Before you judge me a dumbass, dear reader: we follow the sign for about a quarter mile inside the airport, to a large counter. I ask the woman sitting behind the desk to forgive me for interrupting her personal cell phone call, and that we’d like to know which gate we need to be in for our Miat Mongolia flight to Ulaanbaatar. “This is international transfers for China Air only,” she says, and continues her phone conversation. Oh, I say, looking up at the large, authoritative sign above her head that reads “International Transfers,” giving no hint that there could possibly be another area in the airport that served the same function. I look back down to her. She says we need to backtrack almost the entire way we had come and get in line at counter #1 near the security gate. We find the area and of course, none of the counters are numbered. In the end, we manage to find the appropriate queue, called, “Transfers–Diplomatic Passengers.” We pinch ourselves for missing something so obvious. Continue reading »