Tiny White Fish in Chinese Soup

Here’s Looking At You © Mark Peacock

Lots of travel has kept me away from the mic — Beijing, London, Vienna, Phoenix, New York, and New Orleans. Big difference in airline load factor between international and domestic flights. The international flights were at 30-50% capacity while the domestic flights were booked solid. These trips allowed me to compare the different treatment US airlines get in international airports. This was my first trip to China; it made quite an impression. This string of travel has formed a strong opinion that the thermostat is the most important piece of hotel technology. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.


Here are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #97:

  • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
  • Bless me listeners for I have sinned.  It’s been 8 weeks since my last podcast.  What would be the appropriate penance?  Two Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, sitting next to a mother and lap child on next Tuesday’s 3-1/2 hr flight to Phoenix, and giving up snarky TSA tweets for Lent?  That would be harsh – especially the TSA thing.
  • I have been doing quite a bit of travel since the last episode.  10 days in Beijing, 3 days in London, 2 days in Vienna, a week in Phoenix, and then the back end of last week in New York. I hung around Chicago last week, and then was down in New Orleans this week.  March has me in back Phoenix, then Brussels, back in New York, and then down to San Juan, PR for spring break.  In the first quarter of the year – I will have traveled 11 out of the 13 weeks.  That’s probably my most intense run since 3-4 years ago when I traveled every week from the beginning of September – Labor Day – until Christmas week.
  • The domestic flights have been jampacked while the International flights have been relatively open.  My flight over to Beijing last month, business class was about half full and coach was less than that.  I had the two-side – window and aisle seat – of a United Triple 7 to myself.  It was an upgraded one – with lie-flat seats and big 22-inch monitors. I had both monitors displaying the flight map at different levels of zoom as we went straight north from Chicago. I saw a lot of frozen Ontario.
  • The flight back from Vienna, by way of London, I didn’t upgrade to Business.  I didn’t need to sleep; I had my iPad fully charged and loaded with content, so Coach was fine.  Business was full anyhow, but Coach was two-thirds empty. I ended up with more room than I would’ve had in Business.  People were sacked out across the middle rows.  I had a two-side to myself, so spread out, did a little work, and then mucked around on my iPad.
  • It was a rude crash to Earth, though, on my flights in and out of LGA.  I’m 1K on United, but was 15th in line for the one remaining upgrade. I felt lucky to get an exit row middle seat. I think even the lap kids had status.
  • Bridge Music — Wanna luv you by Henta Ellis

Following Up

  • In the last episode, I talked about the Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker I got for Christmas.  It got a good bit of use in my Beijing hotel room. I was there for 8 days. It only had 2 English-language TV stations – CNN and BBC World News.  You can only watch the 30-minute news rolls just so many times.  I powered through most of my podcast backlog, a few new albums, and a couple of documentaries I’d loaded up before heading over.  Good quality sound and much less awkward than sitting around wearing my Bose headphones.
  • In past episodes, I’ve talked about the “slum” terminals in big airports – the terminal where the non-hub airlines have their couple of gates.  At ORD, United has Terminal 1, American Terminal 3, separated by Terminal 2, the “slum” terminal where US Air, Delta, JetBlue.  In PHX, USAir and Southwest split the renovated shopping mall-like Terminal 4, while everyone else slums it in Terminals 2 and 3.
  • When I fly home from Europe on US carriers, I feel a bit of the same “slum” treatment.  For what I’m sure are security reasons, the US carrier gates are all seem to be inconveniently located at the end of the longest concourse where there are no services – no restaurants, no shops, no bars.  It’s often a hunt for a restroom.  At Heathrow Terminal 2, they tell you it’s a 20-minute walk from security to these gates. No dawdling in duty free.
  • In Beijing, though, it was a very different story.  The United flights to ORD, SFO, and IAD all left from gates conveniently located in the center of the concourse – a 5-minute walk at most from the restaurants and shops.  Nor was there the extra security screening at the gate that you typically go through in European airports.  I just walked out of the bar and right onto the plane.
  • In Vienna, I was experienced a different twist.  I was flying to Heathrow on BMI, but somehow ended up in seemed to be a slum satellite terminal entirely devoted to Russian flights.  It was, once again, at the end of the terminal, and down a set of stairs, complete with a smoking room the size of 4 phone booths, in which at one point I counted 7 guys.  It was the only smoking room I saw in the Vienna airport – which may be the reason it and its Russian clientele got stuffed in the slum terminal.  But that still doesn’t explain why my LHR flight ended up there – unless BMI got a smokin’ deal on gate fees…
  • We’ve had kind of a discussion thread across a few episodes on the TSA’s Global Entry program – pay $100 (which many travel companies like Amex are reimbursing for top tier customers), give the TSA your life story and a set of finger prints, and you skip the US immigration lines for a set of kiosks over in the corner.  It’s been a huge time saver for me and a number of TravelCommons listeners.
  • So imagine my surprise – returning to Chicago from Vienna by way of Heathrow – I see 5-10 people queued for the Global Entry kiosks and no waiting for a live immigration agent.  I had filled out the customs card on the flight, so I walked up to an agent.  He processed me, saw the GE sticker on my passport and asked why I didn’t use a kiosk.  I pointed over to the line.  “Yup,” he said, “you knew that was going to happen eventually”
  • Bob Fennerty commented on Facebook
    • Maybe the model will flip someday: Global Entry will be free and instead of paying to use a kiosk you’ll pay to be processed by an agent. I always fill out the customs card on the plane so that I can choose to use GE or not. I probably skip the kiosks every fifth or sixth arrival.
  • And if I can slip one last TSA comment in before I try to give it up for Lent, what’s with the incredible waste of machinery at most TSA checkpoints?  On my last trip out of PHX, the TSA lines was 15 minutes – while 4 of 6 lanes of screening equipment sat idle.  Same thing in ORD a week ago – a 15-minute wait in the status line while 4 lanes of adjacent equipment was unmanned.  The problem?  The full body scanners.  Not only does the full body scanner take longer – instead of the second it takes to walk through the metal detector, you have to stand with your arms raised for 5-7 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the remote screener to radio the “OK” to the gate keeper who then opens the gate to let you out. 10-20 seconds per person instead of the 1-2 seconds it takes for a walk-through metal detector – that math isn’t difficult.
  • And then add to that the additional staff the body scanner requires – the remote screener, the gate keeper, the one at the front keeping everyone queued… and you see the double effect – not only does the body scanner slow down the two lanes running through it, it also consumes staff that might be manning 1 or 2 of those idle lanes.  I don’t think a little more efficiency and a little less line time is too much to ask from an agency that spent over $8 billion last year.
  • If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
  • Bridge music — Snub-Nosed Aardvark by Derek K. Miller

First Trip to Beijing

  • My first trip in 2012 was a big one from Chicago to Beijing – just short of 14 hours each way on United’s direct Chicago-Beijing flight.  The timing on the flight over was a bit goofy – I left at noon on Tuesday and landed in Beijing around 4:30 Weds afternoon.  I had a hard time figuring out when I was supposed to sleep.  As I mentioned at the start of the show, the flight was a polar route – straight north from Chicago, over Ontario, Alaska, and then down over Siberia.  I did manage to take an afternoon nap, but pretty much putzed around for 14 hours.  I looked out the window a lot after we crossed the Arctic Circle looking to see some Northern Lights – no luck.  Did some work, listened to podcasts, watched a couple of episodes of a BBC documentary on the history of Beijing that I’d ripped down to my iPad.
  • After 14 hours in a dry metal tube, it was refreshing to walk out into a spacious, modern, clean airport.  As you would expect since the international terminal – Terminal 3 – opened right before the 2008 Summer Olympics.  And it’s big – with more space than all 5 of London Heathrow’s terminals combined.
  • This was kind of an underlying observation during the whole trip – with more than 1.3 billion people – a lot of things just have to be big in China. While I knew this intellectually before the trip, it didn’t really hit me until I was there.  20 million people in Beijing, and it’s smaller than Shanghai. A local guy I was working with said that he was from a small town about an hour west of Beijing.  “And how many people live in your town?” I asked.  “About a million,” he answered.  And he said this with a straight face.

    On A Clear Day You Can See Across the Street © Mark Peacock

  • The other thing I thought I was prepared for, but really wasn’t, was the pollution.  We all remember the warnings before the Summer Olympics – about how the pollution was going to bring the marathoners to their knees.  And then nothing really happened. Well, the day after we arrived, the first day of business, we walked out of the office building and down the block to a restaurant for lunch.  Halfway down the block, I could feel the itching in the back of my throat.  Then my eyes started burning.  By the end of the day, I had a low-grade headache.  And this was just the first day.
  • Not that it got any better.  We started joking that on a clear day, you could see across the street.  Looking up at the sky, we had no problem looking directly into the sun; one guy got a nice photo with his iPhone.  I was running a pollution headache about every other day. I started looking forward to my flight home
  • The food was very good – if you like Chinese food, which I do.  We ate at a lot of different restaurants, all of it good.  But at just about every meal, there was one dish that made you go “Hmmm….”
  • The first night we ate at the hotel.  We had just arrived a couple of hours earlier; were a bit out of it from the time change and the long flight; and so were just looking for a beer and a bit of food – more to keep us awake to try and adjust to the time more than actual hunger. The wait staff didn’t speak much English, but they had a picture menu, so we that helped us do “point & shoot” ordering.  We’ll take one of those and those and those and those – and 4 beers.  The waiter went away, and then came back with a colleague – who could speak a bit of English. “I’m sorry,” she said, “ but we’re out of the pickled donkey meat appetizer you chose, but we can substitute the specially spiced donkey meat instead.”  And then she walked off.  And brought back the specially spiced donkey meat.  In the next couple of days, we learned that donkey meat is a Beijing specialty.  Shanghai? No donkey meat.  But Beijing, you can get donkey meat. Guess we lucked out on our first meal.
  • It was always something. Like when they split the head of the Peking duck and served it on a plate so you could pick at the brains. Or gave me a cup the fish soup with slimy water lily stems and small albino fish staring up at me. Or at the hot pot restaurant where what I though was brown tofu was actually some sort of pressed loaf of duck blood.  And, at just about every meal, there was a plate of jellyfish.
  • But when I wanted to share pictures of this food with friends on Facebook, I ran smack up against the Great Firewall of China. Logged into the hotel’s Wi-Fi, I could Skype back home, run e-mail, do most everything – except access Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  All blocked, but not with a big “Do Not Go Here/Turn Back” error page. It’s like those sites don’t exist – you get a blank web page and you watch it churn and churn and churn, waiting for a reply, until either you give up and move on, or the browser times out.
  • For me, it wasn’t that tough to get around.  I just fired up our corporate Cisco VPN client, nailed up a secure connection to our Scottsdale data center, and bingo, I had a nice tunnel through the Great Firewall. I updated my Facebook and Twitter statuses. Posted a picture of the albino fish soup to Facebook; I was social again. I was also able to download content in iTunes that had been unavailable before – I guess for copyright reasons – things like podcasts from the BBC. Coming onto the Internet from our Arizona data center with a US IP address, everything was back to normal.
  • Before I left, I had been pleasantly surprised to find that AT&T’s international data plan included China.  With this trip and a European trip 2 weeks after, I had bought a 125 MB “bucket of data” for $50 just in case.  On the ground in Beijing, trying to find my way around, 3G connectivity was no problem. But what really surprised me was that I was able to connect to Facebook and Twitter with my iPhone.  For some reason, the Great Firewall had missed mobile data.
  • But even with my social networks reestablished, after 8 days in Beijing, I was out of eyedrops and ibuprofen; I was kinda tired of jellyfish. And with all the Beijingers heading back to their “small towns” for the Lunar New Year festivities, it was also time for me to head home
  • Bridge music — Baja Taxi by Brain Buckit

Most Important Hotel Technology

  • On my Beijing trip, I spent just short of 28 hours on United Triple 7s – a little more than a day.  I spent 8 days in my hotel though, so no matter how good or bad the United flights were, it’s the hotel that would make or break the trip.
  • I stayed in a nice hotel – it was in the north part of the city, right by the Olympic Village.  I could see the Bird’s Nest stadium lit up orange every night. I upgraded my room for an extra $10-15/night so I had a nice sitting area – a couch, chair, a little coffee table – or I guess in China, it would be a tea table.  Some extra space so I wouldn’t have to sit on my bed the whole time.
  • We’ve talked in a past episode about how the importance of the hotel bathroom is often overlooked.  Not in this room – it was modern, clean, spacious, and the shower had good water pressure.
  • But as we’ve talked, a lot of the talk has been about new hotel technology. La Quinta, a US bargain chain, is making noise about their rollout of flat screen HDTVs that let you plug your gaming or iDevices into them. Higher-end hotels are loaning out iPads during your stay.
  • After my 8 days in Beijing, though, I decided that the single most important technology in my hotel room is neither the flat screen TV nor my Jawbone Jambox speaker – it was the thermostat.  For the first 5 days, everything worked fine – my room was a comfortable 21 degrees C or 70 degrees F.  Then one night, my thermostat decided I was too cold.  After a lousy night’s sleep, I woke up to 25 degrees C or 77 degrees F.  I pushed every button on that thermostat, turned it off and on, even downloaded the manual from the Internet and actually read it, but no luck. And, of course, the hotel front desk and engineering staff was of no use.  They came up and pushed the same buttons I did – and got the same results.
  • Their suggestion – open a window.  Which would’ve been a reasonable one if the Beijing air wasn’t so polluted.  As it was, with the thermostat turned off, the outside air began to leak into the room. I could taste the pollution in my mouth when I walked into my room.
  • Maybe I’m a wimp, but after 3 days of this, I would’ve happily traded the flat screen TV and its 2 English-language channels for a working thermostat.
  • It’s pretty common sense – first and foremost I want my hotel room to be comfortable. It kinda goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy – you have to meet my basic physiological needs – the right room temperature, a good night’s sleep, a decent shower – before I can begin to think about the self-actualizing potential of half-a-dozen channels of high-def sports programming.

Closing

  • Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
  • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #97
  • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
  • Bridge music from the Podsafe Music Network
  • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
  • Follow me on Twitter
  • “Like” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook
  • Direct link to the show