amdavidson

Getting to Suzhou Part I

posted on 2008-04-14 - amd.im/CMA8

Well, it took me about 23 hours from Joy's door to the hotel.

It was tiring, but really not as bad as I was expecting.

I'll just go through it chronologically, for the sake of my memory.

I woke up, went through my normal business, getting ready for the 1030 AM pickup from the driver, and got a text from United saying that my flight was going to be delayed. The first nice thing about global services / business class. So I called my traveling companion Matt and we decided to push our pickup back to 12 to give ourselves more time at home and less time sitting in the airport.

So I tooled around the house a little bit more, and sorta got everything sorted out and was killing time in the back room when Tanya came in and said that my driver was waiting outside.

At this point I kinda panicked because I had set up my personal cell as my contact point for the limo company, and had already turned off my personal cell forgetting that they would likely cal me on it. So I rushed out the door and into the Lincoln, and did not find out until later that he was waiting until exactly 12 to knock on my door and I had just run out and into the car at 1155... That was nice of him to do I suppose, but him waiting and me feeling bad about him waiting caused me to rush and spend about 4 hours on the flight going over in my head all the things that I could have forgotten.

No matter though, I got to the airport fine and met up with Matt and got to skip the huge lines in economy by taking the business class line (second nice point about business class).

I went into a bookstore at this point to get something to read and bought a book I tried to read years ago when I was probably 12, but didnt understand it so I ended up giving up, but I figured I'd give it another shot. The book is Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker. Then I hopped in the security line, and unfortunately at SFO there aren't special lines for business class (although apparently there are in Shanghai for the way back).

When it came turn for me to head into the metal detector, I wandered through... BEEP BEEP BEEP... and I realized that I still had my stainless steel watch on, which is heavy enough that it had to be the problem and I stepped back and put it in a bin for XRay... then stepped through again BEEP BEEP BEEP... I had forgotten the iPhone in my pocket... Dangit!

So two failures at the metal detector led to me getting the whole once over by the TSA... my whole person was frisked and metal detected more than once, and each item in my camera bag and briefcase was swabbed with a cloth and then the cloth was analyzed for any errant chemicals that may have been on them. Oh well, so Matt went on ahead and wandered the shops while I caught up with him. We then headed to the Business Class lounge where I munched on the food that was there in lieu of buying myself a real lunch.

And then we got on the plane.