Chinese Fire Drill - Not for Naught David A. Braun - 1998 In the last CDEA episode, NATO (or OTAN, depending on your linguistic preference) bombed the Chinese embassy the day after I got my visa to visit China and ruined my trip to Asia (China, Malaysia, Korea, maybe Taiwan, maybe even Thailand). Having jumped through a series of hoops to obtain said visa, I was less than thrilled. Between the cancellation of that trip and the start of my most recent trip, the deck of responsibilities in our team was reshuffled. Essentially, I was no longer on any of the projects associated with Malaysia, Taiwan, China, or Thailand. Instead, I picked up a few in Korea, Finland, Hungary, Mexico and Brazil. With six projects in Korea, I needed to go there to meet face-to-face and sort some things out. Corporate travel policy in France says you have to get three quotes from the travel desk. (In the US, the company flies Untied, period, unless otherwise unavoidable.) I got my three quotes and found one unusable because it was business class and the rules change means I have to go econo on THIS trip, business on the next one. (Apparently the French management is Joseph Heller fans. One additional drawback to the company policy of France is that I now have miles on eleven different airline programs.) The next itinerary is via Beijing, return via Tokyo - Narita and costs almost twice the first alternative, which has a note, something about "wait-listed." The cheapest is the one I want because it goes via Hong Kong and if I take an early return flight from Seoul, I will have ten hours in HK. The fast train takes about 40 minutes to get downtown from the new airport in the hinterlands and the return ticket is free if less than 24 hours elapse. Therefore, I thought I was going to have a bonus eight hours or so, free, in Hong Kong. Enter Murphy. I filled out the TRAMS (Travel Request And Mangling System) and submitted it Friday a week before I was to leave. Late Monday afternoon I received a voicemail to call travel. I went to visit them. Turns out that the flight(s) is/are still overbooked. Change to Air France CdG to PEK and return via Japan. Oh well. Two and a half hours in Beijing isn't going to get me out of the airport. And 90 minutes at Narita is about right for Narita. All right. So the three quotes I got from travel was really just one. I'll guess I'll take it. At Lyon - Satolas, la femme at check-in asked me if I had a visa. Since my Air Farce tickets were LYS-CDG-PEK and NRT-CDG-LYS, with the PEK-SEL and SEL-NRT portions on Korean Airlines I figured she thought Beijing was my final destination. When she saw the other tickets and Korean visa, her question was answered to her satisfaction. Cut to Beijing... We (me and twenty-nine Koreans on the same KAL connecting flight) had two and a half hours from wheels down to departure time. And it took every moment of it to accomplish the transit. It is now 100% crystal clear to me the origins of the term Chinese Fire Drill. First of all, Beijing is an international airport with concourses and jetways and all that modern stuff; not some banana republic island airstrip. However, none of that stuff works. We got off the plane and on to some busses. BUT! We had to stand around in the rain long enough for EVERYONE to get off the plane so that the folks going to Korea could go with one guy in a yellow shirt and the folks going to Japan could go with another guy in a yellow shirt, etc. We thirty (bound for Korea) followed our guy who told us we should not lose him and he said that it would be easy not to lose him because he wore a yellow shirt (just like 500 other workers at the airport). He was, however, Chinese, which served also to not set him apart. I made up my mind to do my best to stay close enough to him to touch. After the bus ride, we disembarked and entered a huge hall filled with travelers clearing immigration. I would estimate that there were a couple of thousand folks in lines there. You have to clear immigration upon setting foot in China, even if you're just a transit passenger. Our man gathered 29 Korean (29K) passports and mine for some batch processing. He looked at mine and said, "You are American, do you have transit visa? Must have transit visa." I felt at same time chagrined at my lack of preparedness and level of informedness, and pleased that NATO had bombed the embassy. No, I was not happy about collateral damage and loss of life. I was pleased that I had a perfectly good, perfectly valid, perfectly unused, single entry, thirty-day maximum stay, visa for China, neatly stamped in my soon-to-be-replaced passport on recently-inserted page E. Had I not had that inkstain, I would not have been allowed to enter China for transit. If they require me not enter the airport in order to go to Korea from France, I'm not sure how I would have arranged to leave the airport to go somewhere else. Maybe they just put me back on the plane on which I arrived. I don't know and I hope I never do. The 29K stood together in one line and I was ushered to the front of another line. After ruining my perfectly good 30 day visa for a transit, I was allowed to pass into the next stage. The guy in the yellow shirt was there and 29K filed through. None of them had their passports. I still had mine. Next, yellow shirt guy collected 30 plane tickets from us. He handed these to yellow shirt guy number two (YSG2) who took off running in some direction. YSG then lead us up some stairs and down some stairs to a baggage claim area. I had only carryon. Here he paused for a New York Minute[1] and then said to collect our bags and follow him. We were up another set of stairs before he paused to look back and see only me and two other guys. He kept moving. So did we. We then entered a "security area" where they scanned our bags with x-rays and walked us through a metal detector. At least, it LOOKED like an x-ray machine and metal detector. But the belt on the x-ray machine was not moving and some uniformed lady was passing the bags in by hand on one side and another yanking them out on the other. I suspect that the monitor the security officer was staring at was casting a dead eye back toward the security officer. I similarly suspect the metal detector would not. Having cleared immigration and security, we next had to clear customs in another hall. (I was keeping my eye on YSG and can't tell you if anyone lost any bags or people.) We handed in our customs forms. No one ever asked for my quarantine form which is pretty weird. It says, "During your stay outside the People's Republic of China, you may have been exposed to certain dangerous infectious diseases without your knowledge. In order to secure you and other people healthy and prevent the spread of diseases, please bring along this card to any nearest (sic) Health & Quarantine Bureau when you develope any symptom such as rash, fever with jaundice, diarrhoea or vomiting within 14 days after your arrival in China. Then you may enjoy a favored medical service with high quality. According to 'The Frontier Health & Quarrantine Low of the People's Republic of China': If persons arriving in China have fever or suffered from psychosis, AIDS (Incl. HIV carrier), venereal disease, pulmonary tuberculosis and carried biological products/blood products, please make a declaration." This appeared to me to be a form describing exactly what you would have to be a total idiot to declare if you actually wanted to enter China. We were now in the actual Beijing Airport. Next, we had to leave it. Another set of stairs, at the top of which was YSG#2 with a big handful of boarding passes. I saw mine on top and told him that one was mine. He gave it to me. YSG#2 gave the 29k passes to YSG who gave them to some Korean who appeared to have at least some authority over at least some of the Koreans to hand out. Mr. Kim[2] started calling out names and handing out passes. YSG shouted, "ALL SAME!" and grabbed the packet of passes out of Mr. Kim's hand and started dealing them out like liberty passes to horny sailors. Like me, some of the Koreans were amused. Some were pissed off, amusing the amused ones even more. Next we go through a security area with more highly effective western technology (and no glowing lights). Show your pass, they push your stuff through, you continue. Next came another customs area where we basically filed by some bored, uniformed, youths. Up (or down, I can't remember at this point) another set of stairs and YSG halted. Thirty seconds later, YSG#2 reappeared, this time with 29k passports. (I still had mine.) YSG looked at me and said, "You AMERICAN! Come with me!" But his vibe was such that I felt nothing bad was going to happen. We turned a corner and entered another HUGE hall filled with thousands of people in a multitude of lines. He walked me almost to the front of one long line and deposited me there. The guy he put me in front of was western. I looked at him and he looked at me and we both shrugged and looked puzzled at each other. There were about eight people in line in front of me. There was fifteen minutes to boarding time. About five minutes later, the guy behind me asked in German accented English why YSG had put me there. I told him that our connection time was only two and a half hours and I and 29K were getting special treatment because of the tight connection. He laughed. Then he looked around and asked about the 29K. We passed some of the wait as I related the story to him, thus far. With three minutes to boarding time, there were three people ahead of me in line. Yeah we are MOVING NOW! Apparently they felt that they had to stop stamping passports and process all the debarkation cards they had collected from the last hundred (thousand) or so people. Finally, I was clear. A series of crudely hand lettered signs indicated where to go. At some point I took what I thought and hoped was the correct stairwell. (Escalator, actually, only it was not running.) At the bottom were some Korean-looking folks sitting around looking bored (they probably arrived the day before in order to beat the rush). I asked, "Korea 701?" and several nodded in ascent. Turning around, I saw a lady behind a counter. On and in the counter were geegaws and munchies. Sure enough, there was a cooler with Cokes in it. When I had mentioned to Christophe, one of my coworkers, that I was going through Beijing, where he had been the week before, and asked him if he thought it would be possible to get a Coke can for Sam there, he did a wonderful thing. He said, "Yes," and then as a light bulb appeared over his head, he pulled out his wallet and handed me twenty Rimibi. Some day I'll figure out what, if any, is the difference between Yuan and Rimibi. But in any case, I had the equivalent of about $4 to buy a Coke. It cost 5rmb. A buck for a can of Coke is not bad for airport prices. Having completed that transaction and turned around, I saw that the waiting area was emptying through a portal and into a bus. I stashed the Coke and mounted the bus, which carried us past some perfectly good, completely unused jetways to the plane. We got out and stood around in the drizzle for a while. Another bus pulled up and dumped it's contents and finally they gave us the go-ahead to climb the slippery metal steps into the 747. It didn't take long at all for the passengers to get settled and get the plane the Hell out of there. I look forward to someday visiting Beijing. But I plan to consider any itinerary involving that airport, in transit, to be impossible. In yet another re-org, two weeks after my return from the trip to Korea, I lost three of the projects for which I went to Korea, along with the one in Brazil. However, I picked up additional responsibilities elsewhere... this month. But there is always next month, when the wind may blow another way and I'll be back on the projects again. [1] New York Minute: interval between green light and horn honk in the Bad Apple [2] Mr. Kim is a best guess. Mighta been Mr. Park or Mr. Lee. Or there is even a 10% chance it was some other name.