Flight and Arrival

Four meals, two plane rides, and zero conversations later I made it to Hangzhou alongside my fellow travelers, primarily Korean. The Asiana airline flight was comfortable and typical with the exception of two video tutorials presented mid-flight. One immediately followed the standard emergency instructions (life vest, exits, etc.) and basically told everyone to behave, depicting a scene of one parent allowing their overzealous child to parade around the aircraft and another of young students giggling and taking pictures of nude sculptures at a museum. The moral of the story was to ‘behave accordingly’ after the Asiana Airlines’ logo, ‘Behavior accordingly, travel beautifully’. If traveling beautifully means having on board entertainment of recently released films and albums, then I can’t disagree with the beautiful service. The other interesting video was when they showed an in-flight exercise video. In itself an in-flight exercise video is not so strange, but when you watch an entire plane full of people pulling their head left you almost wish you had a camera at the ready.
After arriving in the airport Jennifer, the secretary of the foreign affairs department at the College picked me up and we rode directly to the school in a taxi van. During the 40 minute ride the cab driver cut off the same driver at least 4 times, demonstrated liberal use of the horn, and before pulling away put the window down to yell out something that although semantically unintelligible clearly was not along the lines of, ‘Have a nice day.’ For the first week of being here accommodations will be at a hotel located on the campus of the college. How’s that for convenient! On top of this they’ve put me up on the top, 8th, floor with a great view of the city. The hotel is run by the hotel management department of the college and it hosts teachers as well as normal guests. Low and behold there is free wifi access (i.e. some one in the neighborhood has not locked their wifi service) so except for youtube, facebook, blogspot and some other sites all the luxuries of the world wide web are available. During this week I’ll be apartment hunting and enjoying the week off of holidays.
Happy National Day! October 1st marks the first day of a week of vacation, and the 60th anniversary of the CCP reign. Six decades ago Chiang Kai Shek and his nationalist party was removed from power and replaced by the CCP and Chairman Mao Zedong. 60 years later and this country has been transformed and retransformed to its current state. Click links for full stories…http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8284087.stm…http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/world/asia/02china.html?_r=1&ref=world. To celebrate the day everyone turned to the television and witnessed the parade in Beijing. Actually, despite the amazing military and choreographed dance spectacle on TV, waves of people spent the day off by flocking to the biggest tourist attraction in town, the West Lake, to enjoy its natural beauty and endless monuments, museums, and shops. There are a reported 6 million people in the greater Hangzhou area, and plenty of them were alongside the lake today. After doing an entire lap of the lake, which is a few miles, I figure that if I continue crossing paths with this many new people every day, a year from now almost everyone in Hangzhou will be able to recognize me as the foreigner who wears soccer jerseys.