Sunday, December 26, 2010 Flight to Asia

After a crazy Christmas night out in SF (by myself but quickly made friends with these French peeps), I woke up at 6am and packed all my stuff; I'm so good at packing that it only took me an hour and I only filled up half my carry-on.  Plus I'm planning on buying a whole suitcase worth of fake designer stuff and bringing it back [without telling US customs].  I went to my car to make sure it was still there (phewf), dropped off a set of keys at my office, in case a crazy Venezuelan tries to make out with me and then steals my keys from my hostel again.  Then I got some food at Taqueria Pancho Villa and, sadly, McDonalds.  Then I took the BART to SFO's international terminal.  I love international terminals; they are one of my favorite places in the world.  Nowhere else on earth are so cosmopolitan and diverse.  Except that the SFO one is just all Asia travel.  There was a Lufthansa flight in like 4 hours.  Security was fine.  I knew the flight was going to suck because it was only $1100 and operated by Air China, the national airline of the Peoples' Republic of China (I'm expecting for meals for them to come around with a Communist pot full of gruel).  It was a 747 which was kind of nice, except that the seat backs had no screens, and the main screen was all Chinese TV shows and car commercials, except for the movie Bounty Hunter.  I was sitting next to this 5 foot tall guy who monopolized the armrest and ate sunflower seeds the whole time, and looked like Kim Jong Il.  I'm confident in asserting that the flight was 98% Han Chinese.  The food was crappy (rice and chicken for dinner, and then rice and shrimp for lunch), and of course when we landed in Beijing 12 hours later (one of the longest flights I've ever been on), everyone was already getting up upon taxiing.