My sister: "It feels like one of those movies where society breaks down into chaos. Except this isn't a movie..."
As we waited for our plane in the Guilin airport, we passed the time discussing eye surgeries and the lady that threw up all over my sister in the women's bathroom. Upon boarding the plane, we waited through the usual delays which we had grown accustomed to on Air China, all of us growing impatient to be getting to the futuristic metropolis of Shanghai. Our flight was comprised of three distinct tour groups-
1) Our own, consisting of English-speaking Americans and Canadians
2) A French tour group
3) A group of Chinese peasants
Suffice it to say, we were in for some culture clashes.
While the Frenchmen and women conducted themselves in a refined manner befitting any civilized people, the Chinese peasants apparently thought the airplane was a bar and acted in a boisterous manner, laughing and chortling, leering at the other passengers, and smacking people with their carry-ons.
About midway through this brawl of a flight, the flight attendant piped up over the loudspeaker, delivering a message in Chinese. Amidst the garbled Mandarin, I thought I interpreted the attendant to be announcing that we would be landing in Hangzhou, a popular tourist destination known for its scenery and nature. "Hangzhou," I thought. "This won't be too bad."
Picturesque Hangzhou
A few minutes later, our guide Lucy came speeding down the aisle. "We have a very small delay due to some bad weather at Pudong International Airport," she said. "We will be landing in a new city called Wenzhou. It will not be so bad."
Wenzhou, a far cry from Hangzhou
Although Wenzhou was no Hangzhou, it was still just an hour flight from Shanghai, and held the potential to be an interesting stop on our way to Shanghai. Apparently, our peasant friends thought so too, as the moment our plane touched the ground at Wenzhou Airport and the flight attendant began her announcement to remain in our seats, the peasant tour group had already made a mad dash to the front of the plane, smacking every passenger unlucky enough to have been assigned an aisle seat upside the head with their carry-ons. As the remaining passengers began filing out of their seats to disembark the plane, the French group remained still in their seats, paralyzed, no doubt, by the barbarousness they had just witnessed.
Once on the tarmac, we were instructed to wait for shuttle buses to take us the remaining 500 feet to the airport terminal. The three intermingled groups boarded two buses and made our way to the terminal where we prepared to await our uncertain fate. At this point, the airline had not made a decision whether our spontaneous layover would be merely a pit stop or an overnight stay.
As time ticked by and we began to grow more tired and irritable with no definite resolution to our quandry, the sense of surrealism heightened. Many a stalled passenger had retired to the men's room which became the de facto smoking room, billowing with clouds of thick gray smoke which seeped out into the main terminal. Within the already confining airport terminal housing our three tour groups, the group of peasants alternated between stampeding towards the gate to find out the latest update from the airport representative and taking the time to party it up and have a good time.
Before long, every flight status on the "departures" screen had changed to "canceled" and our fate had been sealed. We would be spending the night in Wenzhou.
Somehow the airline had deigned that the Chinese peasant group would stay at one hotel for the night, and our group would join the French group at another hotel. We all sluggishly boarded a bus which would transport us to our destination a few miles from the hotel. As we pulled away from the airport, it became clear that Wenzhou was definitely not a city that regularly hosted tourists. Unlike our other stops, there were no downtown districts nor tourist attractions to observe as we drove through the town.
Ironically, each unexpected twist actually ended up making our evening a much greater experience. After a week and a half of perfectly, meticulously planned schedules and itineraries, the spontaneity and mystery of the Wenzhou adventure was more than welcome. The four star hotel we stayed at was a far cry from the Marriotts and Sheratons we had grown accustomed to, but there was something far more authentically Chinese about sleeping on rock-hard beds and using bathrooms splotched with brown stains than sleeping on plush queen-size beds and using bathrooms decked floor to ceiling with marble.
By the time we got to bed at 1:30 am, bereft of luggage and sleeping in the clothes we'd worn all day, there was a distinct sense of having been through something unexpected yet entirely welcome, as if we had brushed past the golden facade of "tourist China" and had a brief encounter with a small part of "real China." As discomforting as the Chinese farmers' conduct had been, there was no denying that their behavior had been authentic and unfiltered, and had granted us insight into the culture of the average rural Chinese citizen.
And I'll take that any day, luggage-smacked head and all.
No comments:
Post a Comment