I arrived back in Wudaokou on Tuesday, January 24th, at about 10pm. Now well into the Chinese New Year celebration, the people of Beijing had long fled to their villages far outside to city, leaving the streets of my neighborhood all but completely deserted. There were the occasional firecrackers and a passing public bus, but the lively street venders and confused mess of taxis, cars, bikes, and pedestrians in the intersection were gone. Shops were closed, buildings were dark. I went up to my apartment.
I entered to find it not unlike the street scene below, cold, dark, empty. My roommates were both back in the United States on break. I was just stopping in for the night before my flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the next day. The heat had been off since New Year’s Day, and so you can imagine that the apartment would be chilled through by now. I fired up the heat full blast in my room, but still it took hours before I could take off my heavy winter coat. Imagine the scene: me, in a dark, cold room, wearing a parka and sleeping under a make-shift pile of covers, some of which were admittedly "borrowed" from the airline.
My flight to KL was not until 3:50pm, and the time being only 8am or so, I decided I had time to take a proper shower and pack my bags. To my dismay, I discovered that the apartment was without water. The predicament was odd, since I remember the faucets and toilet running the night before. When I turned on the shower faucet this time, it dribbled for a few seconds, and then ultimately ran dry. The same then went for the sink and toilet. This was, for lack of better words, not good.
I informed my landlord via text message, informing her that I’d be heading to Malaysia, but that the problem must be fixed by the time A. returned on February 3rd. I also emailed A. and M. to fill them in on the situation. I assumed that since there had been no one in the apartment for so long, someone must have come by to deliver a water bill that went unpaid, and subsequently the water service turned off our water.
Well, there is no use for me here, I figured, so I might as well go to Starbucks across the street where it is warm, where they have water for coffee, where I can sit and read a while before I have to head off to the airport. And it’s a good thing I did, for I remembered an instance in which we had encountered the same water problem. I went back to the building to look for some sort of notice of temporary water shut-off notice but found none. I grew less hopeful.
Back up to the 14th floor I went just to check one last time. Sure enough, water had again started to dribble out of the faucet. I waited a few more minutes, and the water finally returned to normal, but only after expelling the pockets of air that had accumulated in the pipes. Disaster 1: Averted.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the flight from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur. I took a cab rather early to the airport, seeing as I had nothing much else to do home and could at least have some more coffee and read at the airport. I sat doing just that for about two hours, and then, exactly 3 hours before my flight was scheduled to depart, I walked over to the check-in desk. I though that since I was so early, I would just breeze right though. Quite the contrary, there was already a healthy line forming.
After about 15 or so minutes, I was just second in line behind a group of Chinese travelers in their mid-50’s. Just then, a much younger Chinese girl carrying a group tour flag steped up to the desk to handle her business. Believing the young girl had cut the line, one of the older women yelled, “Hey, you can’t cut the line! The line is back there and we’ve been waiting!”
“I did not cut the line!” Responded the young woman, "we’ve just moved our bags over there and need to finish our business.”
I could tell by the tone of the argument that it was inevitably going to escalate. And it surely did. The male representatives in each group also began to argue, but seeing the attention they were now attracting, decided it might be best to separate the ladies into their corners. I had thought about interjecting with some rational thought, but decided that it would be most prudent to slip unnoticed past both groups and check myself in and get moving on my merry way. As I was doing so, the police were called over to settle the dispute. The younger woman had accused a man from the other group of hitting her. Of course, denials abounded, and no one else wanted to get involved. I got a laugh out of the agent at the ticket counter when I said to him, “警察来了，我得走了” – “The cops are here, I gotta go!”
Our gate was the farthest from security, in the basement, and there was bus waiting to transfer us across the tarmac to the plane. We walked up the steps with 30mph winds in 20 degree weather into the plane. I crouched down to get behind the barrier to avoid the cold. Once inside, I found my seat at 33C: the aisle seat in the last row backed up against the lavatory. As you can imagine, I had the double privilege of smelling excrement stench from a seat that would not even recline. What’s more, I was in the vicinity of about five eight- to ten-year-old Chinese children whose parents were either too busy or too disinterested to monitor their behavior, which included screaming, kicking, punching, climbing on seats, opening up the overhead bins, running up and down the aisles, and being generally obnoxious.
I took my blanket, put it over my head, and was not seen again for the six and a half hours it took to get to Kuala Lumpur. But here I am. It is hot. More to come shortly.
