Three Years in Nanjing

Mid-August 2009. Newcastle airport was damp and chilly, which was normal for that time of year. We had a short flight to Schiphol Airport, including a cup of coffee which we just about had time to drink before landing, then onwards to Beijing. It was a long flight to Beijing, and the seats weren’t really designed for an overweight Geordie, so once I was wedged in that was it. Luckily I had plenty of leg room which is more than can be said for my wife who had to sit elsewhere on the plane due to our late booking and, as someone who is only five foot four inches, she was surprised to find her legs rammed up against the seat in front. We swore we’d never fly with Air China again, but it wasn’t to be. A funny story on the flight over was when I went to get washed after a night on the plane. I was sitting there minding my own business when there was a knock on the door, ‘Are you alright sir’. I ignored it and carried on freshening up, but those toilets are a tad small at times when you’re trying to get washed and clean your teeth. ‘Sir, are you alright in there?’ came another call through the door. With a mouthful of tooth paste I mumbled ‘Yes’ and finished off. When I opened the door I was surprised to find one of the airline hostesses waiting for me outside the door. ‘Is everything alright sir? Are you unwell? Is there a problem?’ I stood there like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights and sort of stammered ‘well, er, yes. Why what’s the problem?’ I felt as if I’d committed a crime by going to the loo, but apparently I’d hit the emergency button by mistake during my attempts to move around the cramped toilet. I’ve been travelling abroad for holidays since I was a child, but nothing quite prepared me for China and, on the flight to Beijing it suddenly began to sink in that we weren’t on holiday as, when we were standing in the queue to board we realised that almost everyone on the flight was of Chinese origin. Only having travelled in Europe and North America this realisation that we were the ones that were different began to sink in, and it’s something that we never really got to live down. We didn’t actually get out of Beijing Airport as we had to wait for a connection to Nanjing, but eating wasn’t a problem as the airport sold the biggest apples I’ve ever seen – they were about the size of a Galia Melon! So, 24 hours after leaving Newcastle and our beloved Tyneside, here we were landing in Nanjing, China. We weren’t ready for it! Before flying I’d been contacted by someone called Nancy who worked at the school I was going to be teaching in, and who’d said that she would be meeting us at Nanjing airport. We were tired after the long journey, especially as neither of us had had a particularly comfortable journey. We grabbed our cases from the carousel and followed the exit signs into the main part of the airport, and there we came across this tiny, young woman who walked up to us and said ‘Mr Derek? This way’, and shot off across the airport building. At Newcastle airport we’d had a problem with two of our cases as they were classed as excess baggage and was going to cost us in the region of £1500 to get to Nanjing. The clothes inside weren’t worth that! We eventually managed to get them flown via a cargo plane a week later and I was trying to explain this to Nancy, but by the time I’d started talking, she was away. So Anita (my wife) and I staggered after her, tugging our remaining cases, through this lovely air conditioned airport, and followed her outside where we were simply floored by the sheer heat and humidity of the place. Before leaving I’d read up on Nanjing and found out that it was known as a ‘furnace city’ due to its location between the Purple Mountains and the Yangtze River which held the heat over the city. I was to later find out that this was compounded due to the pollution hanging over the city. Anyway, we set foot outside of the airport and immediately seemed to melt on the spot. The temperature was in the high 30’s and humidity was over 90%. Sweat was literally pouring off us and our clothes became even more sticky and uncomfortable than they had been after 24 hours travelling. Just to compound the problem of sweaty clothes, we discovered another problem when we got to our hotel in that, in our panic at Newcastle Airport over our excess baggage, most of our underwear ended up in the delayed case. Not a problem, go and buy some you might say. However, Chinese bodies are somewhat of a different shape to ours and the only underwear we could find appeared to be about the right size for Barbie and Ken. That week waiting for our case couldn’t go fast enough!