3. Beijing Airport

The new terminal is spacious and modern. After a quick restroom stop, where some guy shut himself in the toilet and started throwing up immediately, we made a bee-line for the line for foreigner’s entering the country. I get the feeling that the girls always hate my pace until they see the crowd we beat and how long the lines are. Maatie got a few looks… hell, we all did. And I was starting to sweat. The temperature in Beijing when we arrived was upwards of 80 degrees. While the terminal itself was air-conditioned, there were pockets where it felt like the furnace was on. From there we made our way to customs with nothing to declare and waited behind a family who just couldn’t seem to figure out how to scan their passports. Grueling.

I was able to contact Cyndi at KaiWen to alert her of our arrival and she communicated that someone would be there at the terminal to pick us up and help us take care of our business. On our way to Terminal 3, where we were supposed to be met by Helen from KaiWen, I got spot checked to run my bag through an x-ray machine. Fortunately it didn’t break my stride, and I was able to run it through and pick it up on the other side without any fuss. 

Turning that corner, we encountered a sea of people, most with signs with names on them. I felt like an anonymous rock star, wading through a sea of blind teenage fans. I managed to eye Helen, from KaiWen, who had a sign with my name on it and directed the girls in her direction. We rushed through the formal greetings and did an about face to plunge back into the madness, like salmon swimming upstream. Awkward, especially because my luggage handle wasn’t cooperating. 

Helen took us to get our SIM cards replaced with Chinese ones. The process was fast and furious and involved our passports, handing over our phones, and getting some texts in Chinese we needed to interpret later. We did get our old SIM cards back along with our new phone numbers. It was all a bit hasty and made me kind of paranoid, particularly because they copied our passports, I wasn’t clear on what the service rates were, and not clear on how payments were to be made or if they were covered by the Academy. We were given the option of exchanging currency, but decided to forgo that step as we were supposed to be getting our bank accounts set up and would be able to withdraw RMB without a fee then.

From there we met our driver, a guy who appeared out of the crowd and grabbed Maatie’s bags. Had I not seen the acknowledgement between him and Helen, I would have thought he was an overly aggressive taxi guy. We beat our feet through the heat to the parking garage where we loaded our bags into a minivan, and were handed over to the care of the driver, who shuttled us to the Holiday InnExpress, where we were to be staying for two weeks.