OMG – today has been such a prick of a day. First we had to get up early, pack our stuff, get out of the accommodation, say good bye to the Small Child and SaucyMary, lug our crap up to a main road, hail a cab, get to Shinjunku JR station, find the right platform and catch a Narita Express train all before 5:55am. :/
Yeah, was about as much fun as it sounds.
Tripit had informed us tht our flight had been rescheduled from 10:50am to 10:00am (thankfully) or we would have booked a later train and potentially missed our check-in time. So yay for Tripit.
We get to Narita, go to check in and find that the China Eastern Airline counters are NOT EVEN OPEN at 7:00am in the morning… what sort of airline doesn’t have service counters open at that hour? Anyway, we dutifully stood in line until they opened, and checked in our luggage without incident – except I noticed a sign saying that the gates were a 20 minute walk away, and the customer service representative told us there were no shuttles or anything to move people to the gates. Le sigh. At least we had a Qantas Club to look forward to once we walked out there.
Have boarding passes, make our way out to the Main Terminal where all the gates are located and rock up to the doors of the Qantas Club to be greeted by a sign saying they don’t open until 8:30am! What’s with this place, does everyone sleep in or something? Does no one fly for business purposes? We walk back out and find somewhere to sit and find some wifi to talk to people back home before we think we are going to have to go dark in China due to shitty internet and data security risks.
Go back down to the Qantas Club at 8:30am – flight is still at 10:00am and MrK was dying for a coffee at this point – only to find out that the stupid travel agent hasn’t booked us on a proper code share flight… and the Qantas Club actually turned away a paid up member, who is flying with an affiliate airline because of a lack of code share codes. First time I have used a travel agent in about ten years – last time I will use a travel agent if I can avoid it.
So we wander out and look for coffee and toast. Find a not so tidy coffee shop and settle for that until our flight is being called. Eventually we board and do the overhead locker and shuffling in the seat thing and are all settled in around 9:50am, and then for some reason we get held up. And, guess what? Our flight ended up sitting on the tarmac until the original scheduled 10:50am departure. FFS.
Which meant that our 1hr 30min layover in Shanghai was gobbled up in being late. We got shuffled off the plane in Shanghai by way of steps onto the tarmac, crammed into barely air conditioned buses and then pushed like cattle through the entire back end of the airport to clear customs, before being put back on the stupid buses and driven straight back out to the same damn plane and being shown back to same damn seats. Whole exercise was about 30mins and we walked 3 KILOMETERS through the fucking airport in a disorganized shamble. We kept losing sight of the person who was supposedly shepherding us though this process and at one point he dumb bitch disappeared all together and I overheard the French couple behind us who were just as pissed off and bemused at what the hell was supposed to be going on. Why couldn’t we just be processed into the country in Beijing? As it was, in Beijing they singled out everyone on the flight who had come from Tokyo, to make us collect our luggage and go through customs screening again with luggage in tow, so why not just do the immigration processing at the same time. Fucking bureaucratic bullshit. I was so dirty with them – bad enough we left late, bad enough we got all hot and sticky again walking around on the tarmac and through the arse end of the customs world in Shanghai, but to be pushed through another customs screening after they had us enter the country in Shanghai – FUCK OFF.
So, two three hour flights – that took us from 5:00am to 4:40pm later and we eventually arrive in Beijing and are met by our China Tours guide, Kelli. Thankfully we were welcomed into the warm embrace of someone who knows what the fuck is going on and whose job it is to make sure we are comfortable and having a good time. Some ice tea and a drive to the Novotel Beijing Peace Hotel, and we were finally pantless and trying to get over what was quite a traumatic day.
If I had my way I would never fly China Eastern Air ever again – they were disorganised, the communication was sadly lacking and the staff, both on and off the plane seriously didn’t give a shit that so many foreign passengers had no idea what was going on. Fuck them. Fuck them with a rake.
Unfortunately however, our idiot travel agent who booked these open jaw flights has us flying with them again from Shanghai to Hong Kong at the end of this tour. *grump*