As I've said before, I basically jump out of planes as soon as the seat belt sign is turned off at the gate after landing. I happened to be really lucky on this particular flight because the flight attendant pitied me when I asked for a right-handed desk to do work (I already had a left-handed aisle seat) and gave me an open seat in the front row. That didn't really solve the problem because it was the middle seat in a row of five, but it was better than where I was, so I did some work there and eventually just stayed there, including taking all of my bags.
So when we pulled up to the gate and stopped, I took my seat belt off, and as soon as I heard the ding, I launched out of my seat, grabbed my stuff from the overheads, and went careening down the aisle through first class as fast as I could and was probably like the 20th person off the plane, even though first class was huge. Once I was in the airport, I made a pretty mad dash to baggage claim and, of course, had nothing to claim, so just kept going. Next up was customs and immigration. The Chinese national line looked pretty long -- sucks to suckkkk -- but the foreigner line was empty. First one, woohoo!
So I went into the roped off area and walked all the way to the front. At that time, though, there wasn't even a customs worker there to handle foreigners, so I ended up just waiting at the yellow line or whatever. As soon as the workers all noticed me, they signaled one of their guys to go over and help out, and so he starting walking up to one of the booths where the workers sit for processing. And as he was doing that, a middle aged Chinese guy waltzed right on up to the window of the booth, even though I was clearly standing at the yellow line first. Didn't look back; didn't say sorry; didn't say that he was in a rush; just jumped straight to the front of the line as if it was the proper thing to do.
And that's when I knew that I was in China.
Peace out.
So when we pulled up to the gate and stopped, I took my seat belt off, and as soon as I heard the ding, I launched out of my seat, grabbed my stuff from the overheads, and went careening down the aisle through first class as fast as I could and was probably like the 20th person off the plane, even though first class was huge. Once I was in the airport, I made a pretty mad dash to baggage claim and, of course, had nothing to claim, so just kept going. Next up was customs and immigration. The Chinese national line looked pretty long -- sucks to suckkkk -- but the foreigner line was empty. First one, woohoo!
So I went into the roped off area and walked all the way to the front. At that time, though, there wasn't even a customs worker there to handle foreigners, so I ended up just waiting at the yellow line or whatever. As soon as the workers all noticed me, they signaled one of their guys to go over and help out, and so he starting walking up to one of the booths where the workers sit for processing. And as he was doing that, a middle aged Chinese guy waltzed right on up to the window of the booth, even though I was clearly standing at the yellow line first. Didn't look back; didn't say sorry; didn't say that he was in a rush; just jumped straight to the front of the line as if it was the proper thing to do.
And that's when I knew that I was in China.
Peace out.
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