Chinky

08/06/06

"The Road to China"

The days leading up to the trip (day -7 to -1)  This the the beginning.

I did my best to visit as many people as I could.  Honestly.  The problem is that my friends are spread out in so many places that scheduling all those visits was a bit of a problem.  I hope those of you whom I couldn’t visit before hand can forgive me.

The days leading up to the trip was really just cleaning, doing laundry and packing.  In between visiting people I would put in a load of laundry and when I got back I would fold it and pack.  I probably spent a good 2 days cleaning and maybe a total of 1 hour actually packing.  Then it was off to my rents house to do the same thing all over again.

At my parents we were cleaning their fridge of any food that might spoil and the rest of the house as well.  One could only take so much "cabbage soup" before they turn crazy enough to look forward to a 26 hour plane trip.  Oh yea, did I mention I would spend more than an entire day in an airport or on an airplane?

Lewis Black once described riding an airplane as such, "take your hands, and press your head as hard as you can and don’t let up until you’ve reached wherever it is that you’re going."  Usually it’s not that bad for me.  Most of the plane trips that I’ve been on were just domestic and it’s only takes a couple of hours for me to get to wherever that I might be going.  Those aren’t so bad.  International plane trips are a whole other matter.  But even knowing this eating old Chinese food from god knows when make me crazy enough that I was actually happy when I heard "ok let’s go to the airport."

The day of the trip (day 0)

I’ve been having an awful amount of luck with flying as of late.  Before everything was fine, I’d have maybe a book or some music to pass the time but I would usually just not use either and opted to just sleep the whole way to wherever I was going.  It was that relaxing.

This all changed though the last time I was on a plane coming home from Boston.  I sat sandwiched between two rows of screaming babies; I had the aisle seat of a three seated row where two ladies complained about everything that could bitched about and my air vent was broken.  I actually wished that I had been randomly detained at airport security and had to sit between two really fat people because then I would have the airport quad-fecta experience from hell.

I must have grown some since the last time I was on an airplane.  Either that or airtran’s seats are larger than Delta airline’s seats.  In any case it was a 5-6 hour flight to Salt Lake City and then a 2 hour flight to LAX.  In between that time and now I had a temporary bought with insanity so I’m not able to exactly tell you what happened on the flight due to the fact that I can’t remember most of it and the stuff I do remember I’m not too sure if it was real or delusional.  I am sure of this, the potty’s on delta airplanes are comically small and I probably spent a good portion of the trip pretending the air vent was a shower head and trying to use the air coming out of it to wash some figment of my imagination off my body.  Like I said, I was starting to go nuts.

It wasn’t until the flight to China did it start to get really bad though.  The flight from LAX to Guang Zho, China is a 15-16 hour flight.  This usually isn’t so bad because you spend a great deal of that time sleeping.  I however am too large to find any position that is simply not painful, let alone anything that one can fall asleep to.  Quite literally every position I could sit, lean, slouch in was painful.  I was so happy when we finally got into the air and I could stand up and walk around.

If you’ve known me for a while you know that I’m a pretty decent sleeper.  I can sleep almost anywhere and I can sleep at nearly anytime.  I cannot however sleep when my knees are being jammed into the seat in front of me and unable to reposition myself due to the arm rests giving me a Charlie horse in either thigh.  Those of you who know me that sleep deprivation also makes me a little insane.  Not in any sort of dangerous way but more in the not going to make any sense sort of way.  I remember using words to describe my situation and not really being sure if they are in fact actual words.  “Incroptulable,” “apticutable,” “Irregressable” are some of the words I can remember saying to my dad and having him giving me a puzzled look.

When the plane landed I knew I had to get out of there.  I felt like a sponge and the plane was a bowl of crazy and I was just sopping it all up.  I had probably annoyed every person in an aisle seat from walking up and down the aisles so much, every stewardess from walking into their work area and probably made a couple people worried that I was somehow going to crash the plane.  Luckily we were flying to China and no terrorists want to bomb China.  They make all the bombs here.  Hell, they make everything.

I was so nuts that there was no one on the plane that was even pleasant to look at.  Now I’m sure that in a plane that size with all the walking I did there HAS to be at least one good looking person on the plane.  Statistical logic almost demands that in 200 people, one of the has to be at least mildly attractive.  Yet nearly every person I saw, in my eyes, had a look that was almost obscene.  I guess I don’t like a lot of people when I’m sleep deprived.

At one point I found myself in the toilet splashing water onto my face when I realized, the lavatory is WAY roomier than my seat on the plane.  I mean I could have easily made it into the mile high club in this bathroom if I 1) could find someone willing and 2) stopped being crazy.  Since neither of them seemed likely to happened I sat down and fell asleep for I think 20 min in the lavatory of a China Air 777.  It just occurred to me that the last time I was this sleep deprived (helping Jesus move his aunt’s stuff to Boston) I had also fell asleep in a bathroom.  This is a bad trend that would probably be best if it never happened again.

When we touched down and got off the plane it was 6 or 7 am in China and instead of going to the hotel it was time to get on the bus and start the trip.  I do believe I’m fucked.