It was Wednesday afternoon and I made my way to Narita Airport on the Narita express. Beth and I decided to meet up there. I sat and waited and started worrying when it was about a half hour before boarding when she came strolling around the corner. She had been waiting in the NWA lounge. I was slumming it in the general seating. We sat down by the gate and Beth sat next to a guy who was completely out. Snoring like a buzz saw in the next seat. Just the first of many loud body sounds we enjoyed listening to in China. This guy I had to document with my camera. Thus began some of the funny things that happened to us on our trip.
I seemed to get the serious security check at every airport while Beth breezed through. I was pulled aside immediately, my bags were searched, I was patted down (oooh baby!) and waved over by the wand, was told to take off my shoes- all this AFTER I had already gone through security. It was after walking through the door on the way to the airplane. I'm not sure if this was because we were flying to China, but whatever... While I was enjoying all this attention, BETH WAS GETTING AN UPGRADE to business class. She is GOLD elite, I'm only SILVER elite. She tried to get them to upgrade me too, even after she was seated and there was an empty seat beside her...But I told her to enjoy it, since her company doesn't routinely fly them business class.
Into economy class I went. At least I had an aisle seat. But no. There was a little girl in my seat, next to her Mommy who asked me to switch seats so that they could sit together. Of course I said yes. Didn't want to break up a family. So I was stuck in the middle of the middle between 2 guys who both took the arm rests and who poked me with their elbows repeatedly for the 3 hour flight. So I just put myself in the good music zone, shut my eyes and listened to great tunes I haven't heard in a while. When we arrived we were informed that health inspectors would be boarding the plane and checking everyone. A group of somewhat scary-looking uniformed, masked and gloved individuals boarded the plane, armed with little temperature sensors that they pointed like guns at everyone's forehead to check for fever. As they were doing this, the plane was deathly quiet except for a couple of American sounding people right behind me telling about their friends who had been quarantined for a week because someone on their plane had shown a temperature above normal. I sat there hoping no one on board was sick because there would go our trip plans...but we were lucky and everyone was released off the plane. All 4 of us in the center of the plane in my row were wearing masks. But once in China, masks were pretty rare.
Beth is a fun loving person, and bursts into song whenever something makes her think of one. It's always something I know and we finish the song together, usually successfully pulling the long forgotten lyrics out of some dusty drawer in our brains. The first one was "Hey Big Spender" in the hotel Wednesday night. The other ones were sparked on the street, in taxis and on the great wall. On the way to the Great Wall, Beth started singing a Chinese song that Grace and the driver both knew. It's called "Jao pung yo." Looking for a friend. They were singing and I was transcribing the melody into solfege and trying to get them to sing it the same way twice. This proved a little difficult so what I have is an approximation of what it must be. We asked our other guides to sing it, and it seemed to me that everyone sang it a little differently. The driver on the the way to the wall had been silent until we asked him to join in the song, which he did, tentatively at first. It seemed that everyone we met, Beth managed to make sing, dance or perform for us in some way. She just has a knack.
Some of the people we encountered on the wall were an Indian family, an older Chinese lady, kids playing cards, a young American woman who had hiked way past the safe area and who came back to report to us what she found, a British guy and his wife who seemed really lovely, a Chinese guy who like to yell to hear his echo, and a man with a donkey.
After our hike on the wall, we were pretty tired, our feet hurt and we had the opportunity to take a luge-like slide down the mountain. F.U.N.
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