My Adventures: flights

For those of you who may be new to the blog, the way I usually break posts up is by city. I’ll put some random thoughts and stuff in between, but in terms of “stuff I did”, you’ll have to wait until I leave for the next place to see a post. So, since I’m still in Sydney and that post won’t be ready for a few days, here’s a post about a few things before I arrived in Sydney. Feel free to leave comments about anything related to the post, including feedback. I think the “posted by” defaults to Anonymous unless you’re logged into Google, so leave your name, too. There have been two very clever comments on the previous post, but unfortunately, I don’t know who to attribute them to for this reason :(

If I had to pick two things I was worried about going into the trip, they would have been having to deal with long flights and not meeting anyone. I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with how well both of these things are going so far. Here’s why:

Long flights: I know these two things will both come as a surprise, but I’m not a patient person, and I really hate being stuck in the same place for long periods of time. In fact, a big reason I don’t like watching movies is because it requires me to sit in the same place for 1.5+ hours. That being said, I was a little (aka very) anxious about my flight from New York City to Sydney, which connected in Guangzhou, China. That flight was to take 16.5 hours (by the way, I wish they had an equivalent of upper case for numbers, because what that should sound like is SIXTEEN AND A HALF!! hours). On a scale from 1-10, I would place myself at 8.5 about how sure I was that I was going to be bored out of my mind for the entire flight. Here’s the cool thing… that didn’t happen, mostly due to awesome planning by me (#modesty). Really though, there were 3 things that contributed:

My flight was to arrive in Sydney at 8am, and my goal was to make sure I was ready to hit the ground running when I landed. In order to do that, I had to be very selective about how I slept. According to my Jawbone UP24, I slept about 3.5 hours the night before my flight, which allowed me to be sufficiently tired to be able to sleep on the plane when I wanted to, but not tired enough to fall asleep without trying to. I needed to maintain that level of tiredness, because upon connecting in Guangzhou, I needed to sleep the entire flight to Sydney. So using this strategy, I probably got about 8 hours of sleep during the first flight (thanks to lay flat seats), and I succeeded in making it through the day of arrival without being too tired.
Flying international business class makes time feel like it goes by fast. They offered 3 meals during the first flight (a 5-course meal, a 3-course meal, and a snack, which I slept through). If you add that up, it probably accounts for a not-insignificant 1.5 hours of the flight.
I know I just said I don’t like watching movies, but when I don’t have a choice about being stuck in the same place, movies are actually a great way to pass the time (queue everyone's collective, "duh"). I finished the second Hobbit movie and watched the third; this probably took up about 4 hours of flight time. Add in take off, landing, trying to understand the Chinese crew’s English, and bam, that’s basically the entire flight. Not too shabby.

Not meeting anyone: Despite the fact that I knew I would meet people along the way, there was still this thing in my mind that said, "ANKUSH, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" So far, though, I think feel a lot better about this as well. Below are a couple of small events that helped me feel better about it.

Background: Delta has a very cool feature in a few of their Sky Clubs across the country (I believe it’s ATL, JFK, and LAX), where they have an outdoor seating area where you can eat, drink, watch planes taxi/take off, and inhale jet fumes (wait, that one doesn’t belong). This was something I was very excited about seeing, so the first thing I did when I got to JFK was head straight there. Upon arriving at the outdoor area, there was one other person there, who works for a newspaper company in the bay area. We struck up a conversation, and before you know it, we’re LinkedIn connections. Good way to kick off the trip.
On the flight from Guangzhou to Sydney, one of the flight attendants was Australian. I’m pretty sure they stuck her with me because I’m the only person who didn’t speak Mandarin on the plane, but I’ll take it. She was very cool and gave a bunch of suggestions on things to do while I’m here.

Other things:

After being in the Guangzhou airport for < 1 hour, I came to the conclusion that it’s nearly impossible to share opinions (or anything, really) in China. There’s no Google, no Facebook, no Snapchat, and no Instagram. It’s like they’re begging me to Reddit all day (I know, I’m shocked that’s not banned either). I’m sure there are Chinese equivalents to all of these sites, but as someone who lives in the US, it’s very weird to type in all of these sites and have them time out. Upon additional testing, I was able to access all of these sites through the mobile network but not through WiFi. I wonder if that’s some kind of deal the carriers struck with their Chinese partners… Thanks T-Mobile for the free international (2G…) data!
I was slightly worried about what flying China Southern would entail since I’d never heard of the airline. Turns out they’re pretty awesome. Here’s why:

The first plane I flew was a pretty new Boeing 777. I think I remember reading that this flight started about a year ago, and they bought the planes specifically for this flight.
Apparently, they’ll provide you one night at a hotel for free if your layover is between 8 and 48 hours. And they’ll give you a 72 hour visa exemption. If only I had known this before…
Their meals are ridiculous. I alluded to it above, but in two flights, I had three 3-5 course meals and 2 “snacks”. I say “snacks” because honestly, it was more food than if I were to make dinner at home (which also partly may be because I suck at cooking, but that’s not the point). I’m sure part of this was because I was flying business class, but I’m not sure if this is a China Southern thing, non-American airline thing, or I’m just stupid and this is completely normal.
For some reason, my TV stopped working during the flight (I think I’m jinxed because this happened to me on my flight to Hawaii, too), and when they couldn’t fix it, they had a tablet they provided me with which was synced with the system. Pretty sick.