Thursday, April 3, 2008

Nice Start to the Day

I have been looking forward to le premier d’avril for a while now, for today is the day that I return to Nanjing, where I spent a year from summer ’05 to summer ‘06. During that time, I made many great friends at Nanjing International School, and got to know China from a viewpoint more in parallel with that of the Chinese. So its fair to say I was pretty excited when I woke up in Zhengzhou today, even if that was a 5:10 am alarm call.
We arrived at Zhengzhou Airport with plenty of time – 6:45 for an 8:05 departure. All was going swimmingly until we fell into line at the security checkpoint. 3 new tickets later, and we were threw, but the reasoning behind those 3 tickets is absurd. One member of our group was registered on her passport by her maiden name, whereas visa and ticket said otherwise. That got sorted pretty promptly, but considering that she had only once experienced problems with it before, it should have been a non-issue.
Then my father enters the fray. We are both formally named Johan, but his ticket head H van de Ven, so the security girl made sure to make an issue out of that. Upon changing his ticket, she saw that both our tickets read J van de Ven, so nagged us about that, before daddykins advising her in a rather forceful manner: “ta shi wo de haiza!,” or “that’s my son!!!”
So after that kafuffle, we made it through to the gate, minus a bottle of mouthwash, a bottle of water and a bottle of soap. Unfortunately, there was some sort of disturbance at our gate, but we managed to make it onto the plance at the Changsha/ Guangzhou gate.
Now I sit here on a very pleasant flight to Nanjing, relaxing with my packed lunch. This part of the day wasn’t a whole lot of fun, but there’s always some give and take, and I’m sure the rest of the day will be dreamy.

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