The New Math, Hong Kong Airport, Dollars and Sense

Hong Kong is maybe the ultimate duty-free place in the world, and the duty-free area of the airport is bustling with cosmopolitan shoppers from ‘round the world. I found these shops like their counterparts in every airport in the world – overpriced to the extreme. If I have the math right, the 6x over-inflated price reflects a reduction in airports duty to save the customer money, but the airport (with their somewhat captive audience) multiply the 3x over-inflated price by 2x to get something in the range of 6x the normal (non-airport) price. Is this some kind of new, new math? I settle for a 47$ (HK) bowl of fried noodles (about $7 USD).

After checking my large bag with China Southern for the 1 ½ hour trip to Nanning, I headed for the gate to wait 4 hours for my flight. I stopped at a free computer terminal to check email. Little did I know that this was almost the last PC with English characters I would see for 29 days; the same applies for forks. There was only one brief respite from boredom when I found the bathroom signs missing and wandered into the ladies room to wash up a little. I had my shirt off and was just starting to enjoy a little fresh water when women from an arriving flight started pouring in. A quick glance darted from each as they passed on to the toilets, but never a word was said to the big-nose ghost – assumed, of course, to be crazy anyway; this is now China, after all. I smiled a lot, put on my shirt and wandered across the hall, where the sign was also missing. When the odds are 50/50, guess what my track record is with bathrooms.

The flight to Nanning was full to the last seat. The marginally clean aircraft (an MD-80) drove around the airport for about 20 minutes before that great accelerative hand put me back into the seat during blast-off. The old man sitting next to me was drinking intermittently from a bottle of really foul-smelling rice wine and mumbling a lot to the man in the window seat. The stewardess had asked him to store the bottle before blast-off, but Mr. Lau Wan Goo (stubborn old man) refused. Since the elderly are afforded a special dispensation rendering them immune from the everyday rules that we mortals adhere to, she gave up after 2 tries. We arrived in Nanning 1 ½ hours later, and the China I remember surrounded me again.

Everyone crowded to get off the plane first. In China, people will push, shove, wriggle and step on your toes to get in from of you in line. Although annoying, this is a usually harmless Chinese-ness that is to be expected; you get what you grab here. I can usually put a stop to it by planting my relatively large self in the aisle, which leaves no room for circumvention, and waiting my turn while ignoring the muttering behind me. After waiting in line for ½ hour, I was passed through customs and met my friends in the terminal. First stop – slept for 2 days straight and got my head to stop spinning. When I woke up, China was still there.