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End of day recap February 4th 2010

Thursday February 4th (Shanghai and SFO, PDX)
I’m writing all of this on my flight from PVG to SFO.

Preflight check-in information is incorrect. The flight home is pretty packed! The three seats to my left have been taken up by a family of three. Oh well. I still have the aisle seat and some legroom to stretch out to the actual aisle itself. Yay for using travel agents through the company and having saved seating preferences!

This is a 10.5 hour flight to SFO today. Let’s get this show on the road! Next stop: SFO! I guess this flight feels less like a cattle drive than the flight out here. But then again, I have been living in a city of 20 million (?) people for the last two weeks. There definitely is no concept of a personal bubble. People push and shove to get somewhere and they don’t wait their turn.

I woke up around 4am this morning – 8 hours before my flight. I just could not soundly sleep through the night with the anticipation of finally flying HOME! I did get to catch up with a few friends over Google Chat in the morning. It’s about time we were able to have a conversation without my colleagues bothering me (I didn’t go into the Shanghai office today). Chatting with friends is always a good deal. Talking over the phone would be better, but prohibitively expensive. I did call home a few times though… you know, priorities.

Dude, just now, I was called a banana by the Chinese guy sitting next to me – yellow on the outside with a white heart on the inside. That was rude. Also called an ABC again. Woo. >:

The flight attendant is cute!

1:45pm – Time for take off (well, in a few minutes anyway). I have my gifts in hand and my backpack is safely stowed in the overhead bins. We’re taxiing around the airport. Everyone please have your seats in the full upright position and your tray tables showed! UA 858 is on its way home! I’ll land around 8am pacific time. It’s 21:29 Feb 3rd in SFO at the moment. If all goes well and this flight lands on time, I have a short layover at SFO and then I’ll be on my way to PDX!

I’m not sure what kind of interesting things one can find to write about on the flight home, but I’ll see what I can do for you. I still have DVT plans to review and I’ve been pushing off that work for the last 2.5 weeks. I *should* be doing that on the flight, but I would need a lot of incentive first!

“Hey, you look Chinese, why aren’t you speaking it?” – more words from the guy next to me. Dude, shut up.

Well, I’m doing what I said I would do: I’m capturing my thoughts on paper first. It’s a little more convenient than opening my laptop and waiting for it to come out of hibernation. However, the tarmac bouncing is making it difficult to write with any good penmanship. It’ll just be fine and dandy as long as I can read it and transcribe it later!

1:56pm (Shanghai time) – Still taxiing around the airport. This is a huge place. I kinda wish I was at the window seat so I can take some video of the eventual take off.
1:58pm (Shanghai time) – Woohoo! Engines are reving up! Here we go!

Jessica – I got the maglev photos for you. We topped out at 431km/h this afternoon! There was a loud sonic boom as the second train passed us at full speed. That was a trip! I have a video of the speed indicator as we ramped up. Here is applied magnetics in action! Maybe I should have sat at a window seat on the maglev. That way I could have seen a little bit more of the country. There’s always next time I guess – though still hoping “next time” is a ways out there. I much rather stay home and have the Shanghai team travel to the US on the next round. It’s only fair, right?

Of all the things that I’ve missed from home, my family and friends is first on that list. That’s a good thing. I’ll see you all in a few hours.

We’re hitting some mild turbulence in the first few minutes of this flight! The seat belt sign is on. The flight attendant has announce in both English and Chinese that one should remain seated but some of the Chinese passengers are not listening to the directions on this flight! How difficult is it to understand when the sign is on you SIT?

We’re currently going @ 625mph and passing 25K feet. We’re still climbing!

Yay for filling out the US Customs and Border Protection forms. This is at most a minor inconvenience for all of the freedoms that we all have at home.

Observation: All of the customs forms for foreign countries are in at least two languages – the local language and English. However, the US customs form is only in English. What’s up with that? When I flew into the EU and China, the local country made the effort to cater to the needs to the world traveler. Why doesn’t the US do the same? Are we above everyone else? Let me know your thoughts. I’m sure I’ll get some flak for this one.

So I’ve felt completely foreign in Shanghai. I don’t know Mandarin and I cannot speak Cantonese fluently. Also no one knows Cantonese in Shanghai anyway so any kind of normal communication was an absolute bust! I’ve made this point before. This got me thinking: I think my family heritage will be lost with my generation (or at least with me anyway). That’s a pretty sad thought actually. I never did really learn our family history. I know it’s not too late though; I need to make an effort and find out what I can. Being American born I don’t have any true idea of all of the hardships that my parents, grandparents, or even my great grand relatives had to over come. I admire what my parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents did 30 some years ago and decide to immigrate to the United States to start a new life in the land of opportunity and enjoy the freedoms that we may take for granted. I guess I really don’t know what it really means to be Chinese. Kind of a sobering thought. There’s just too much time to let the mind wander and little activity to do on the plane, ya know? I guess I’m being brutally honest with myself.

We’re currently flying over Osaka, Japan – 890 miles into the flight @33K feet with a 162mph tail wind. 723mph ground speed.

Regarding the US forms: The lady in front of me is graciously helping other Chinese fill out their paper work for entry into the US. How nice of here to do that.

Ah, just finished flying over Japan and Dr. Horrible has started! First of many viewings for this flight, I’m sure. “The world is a mess and I need to RULE IT!”

I can hear a lot of yelling on the place. Most Shanghiese speak REALLY loud. I can hear them through my head phones. Time to invest in a set of noise cancelling ones for a future flight (or even for general zoning out in the office.

My hand hurts from writing these five pages. I’m so used to typing!

Ground speed 719mph. Somewhere over the Pacific. Time to Zonk out w/Dr. Horrible in the background. 4625 miles to go, 2hrs 21minutes on the flight clock.

3hours 16 minutes into the flight. I’m wide awake now. I got a few minutes of shuteye w/Dr. HSAB. OH man! That stinks. The kid two seats down just let one rip. Margin note: Scan these documents! It might be a good sharing idea. This would be something different than just reading electronic text from me all of the time.

Linkin Park’s “In Pieces” is playing again!

A guy just asked me if I would like to trade my seat with his in the very back row of the plane. Really? Why would I even consider that?

We are now approaching the International Dateline. Yay to returning to the same day (Feb 4th) for the second time! Woohoo!! Yippee!! I’m shifting through time!!

646mph, 35K feet. 3115 miles left, 4hours 47 minutes into the flight; 3263 miles traveled. Tail wind is 104 mph. I’m looking at the map way too much! I haven’t paid any attention to the in-flight entertainment.

Cold Play – Clocks is playing in my headphones now.

Snack service has started. Looks like we’re getting a third of a sandwich on white bread, with ham, cheddar cheese and a flimsy piece of lettuce. There’s also a lemon cookie – OOH, I should make lemon cookie! I have lots of random thought tangents. But you probably know that by now.

Airline food is hit or miss. The things you are safe with is soda, and tea. Oh, speaking of which, I seem to have mostly kicked the soda habit while I was in Shanghai. I only had a few cans worth versus the bottles and bottles worth on a weekly basis in the US. The same goes with coffee (mainly because they don’t serve coffee in Chinese restaurants!)

Felicia Day’s ‘(Do you want to date my) Avatar’ is playing. Another OH! Moment –> Must watch Avatar in IMAX 3D again when I get back!

I have not written this much in one sitting in a long time. I guess this is still pretty readable – which is encouraging. At work, I have a tendency to write really fast, but at the expense of legibility and sometimes I spend more effort trying to figure out what I wrote in the first place! This fine tip ball point pen seems to be working out OK! (Yeah, so this is apparently the kind of “interesting things” that I found to write about on the flight home. Hey, you’re reading this. Ha!)

3863 miles traveled, currently going 661 mph at 25K feet. 2530 miles remaining. We’re currently 5 hours and 42 minutes into the flight.

Reflections on the Shanghai airport: This is a huge place! There are two main ticketing terminals. Terminal 2 houses all incoming and outgoing UA flights along with 20 other carriers. The maglev takes you from downtown Shanghai (around Century Park) to the far east side of Shanghai in just under 8 minutes for the 300km/h run, and obviously faster when operating at 420km/h (that’s 268 mph for the people that like imperial units). As with most foreign airports, they are pretty darn smoky – and just like every other place in Shanghai. After going through customs and security I still had an hour and a half of spare time. I can just kick it around the gate and not worry about making it to my flight. That worked out well. I bought a bottle of water after passing through the security gates with the intention of drinking it on the flight. At least that would be some better guarantee that it is drinkable. However, once we entered the gate, the airport officials told everyone that water/liquids would not be permitted on the flight even if you purchased it in the secured area. 30RMB (~$4.20USD) brand new bottle of water tossed. What a waste. Many others scoffed at this. That is crap, but we want to get home so it’s smarter not to make a big fuss!

At 37K ft, 654mph ground speed. 4897 miles traveled, 1340 miles left, 7hrs 16 minutes into the flight.

I really should try and get some sleep. ‘Clocks’ is playing on my play list again. Apparently I have a 2.5 hour mp3 playlist on my laptop!

Hey! It’s time for breakfast on this flight. We’re getting close!

At 38k ft, 5994 miles traveled, 456miles remaining! We’re 8hrs 56minutes into the flight.

We’re just a few minutes away from landing back in the US. YAY! So excited! I think it’s around 7:15am PST February 4th off the California coast. Funny, didn’t I already live this moment halfway around the world yesterday?

My cell phone is going to get turned back on once we hit the tarmac. First things I’m going to do are obviously text and call people! I’m glad to be able to use at least one comfort of ‘home’ again (I’m in the US — that counts as ‘home’ for now… just another flight to go before actually getting back to PDX).

Starting decent; passing through the clouds at 23K ft at 430mph.

Cabin lights are back on. We’re landing at SFO at 8am – 38 minutes ahead of schedule.

Oh I need to find all my receipts and get my expense report in order.

Well, it’s been fun. We landed after 10 hours of flying and after writing 9 pages of notes in my notepad. I’ll see you on the ground. We’re landing this 777.

The plane is currently taxiing to the SFO terminal. LOL, I just turned my cell phone back on… there is a huge backlog of text messages that are now just being delivered. I’m going to get breakfast at SFO. I think I’m done writing for now. My hand hurts. I’ll call you guys when I get into PDX. Cheers!

-T