The Flight

Mairin Chesney
A Castling of Cultures
3 min readFeb 22, 2014

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Just so y’all know — I did write a blog post all about how I cleaned my room, but it was so atrociously boring I decided to spare you the misery of reading it.

Anyways, I’M OFFICIALLY IN CHINA. I’ll be staying in Shanghai for the weekend before heading off to Hangzhou. Geographically, the cities are quite close. I’m staying at a friend’s parents’ house in Shanghai. That relationship is a story unto itself, so I’ll relay it in a future post.

I figured this would be a good opportunity to share 10 pieces of advice/fun facts about flying to China.

  • At the very least, always say “hi” to the person next to you. I did and ended up having a half hour Chinese/English hybrid conversation.
  • If it ain’t clear, you better be drinking more water. You know what I mean. But actually, I most definitely subscribe to the theory of Drinking Gallons of Water to Mitigate the Effects of Jet Lag.
  • Mostly… just don’t eat the food.
Dinner #1
  • The little screens on the backs of the seats run a Linux distro. Yeah Tux.
  • For the love of peace, don’t forget to look out the window. I almost did because all of the windows were closed, but then I passed an open one on my way to the bathroom.
Central Alaska
  • It just don’t matter watchu look like. S’long as you’re comfortable, life’s good. Maybe that’s just an excuse for me to look like this:
  • Find the secretest bathroom on the plane. They usually exist. And they’ll be much cleaner than any of the other bathrooms. Also, the use of toilet bowls quickly becomes more of a suggestion than an actual rule.
  • Learn the art of airplane zen. Personally, I can’t really sleep on airplanes, but I can do this weird thing where I just sort of half sleep and make time go really fast.
  • I’m out of things. I’m jet-lagged. I’m going to give myself three days to use that as an excuse. China is thirteen hours ahead.

Good night!

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