Chernobyl Chicken

and then there was the time that I..... Lady with her own spot to patrol her area for dirt and debris (FOD) on the ramp in Shanghai On short final, ONE of the new terminals at Beijing, it (the terminal) covers 240 Acres of land! Gulfstream owned by our country's finest aviation fuel provider! No accounting taste when designing paint schemes for Chinese biz jet.

June 19th, OFF TO BEIJING

We departed the hotel this morning at 0600 and headed out to the Shanghai airport. Among the more interesting sights to those in the FBO business was the ramp cleaning lady who was literally camped out near our plane- which was at a MINIMUM two miles from the nearest building- cleaning any FOD she could spot on the tarmac. I got a wave out of her and caught it on the Blackberry. The fuel truck finally came with the right hose to fit our plane and we slowly got fueled, only to have to all get out and push the Citation backwards as the fuel truck’s transmission refused to go out of Park and was stranded right in front of us. Unfortunately, no one was available to take a picture of this action as all hands, including the fuelers, were needed to push the plane backwards and slightly uphill far enough for us to be able to start up and depart. Couldn't resist showing you the paint scheme on the aircraft parked next to us in Shanghai, what were these people thinking? Jim and Chris once again took the front seats and I tested my ears on this flight to see if they would clear correctly at last. They did, so I’m back on flying status for future flights when asked. One of the attached pictures shows our friend Earl keeping Mercer and I enchanted with yet another of his stirring tales from his repertoire. Now, I’ve seen some big airports, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything to match Beijing! We must have taxied for 5 miles after clearing the runway to get to the area that had 3 Gulfstreams and us parked in a very remote spot. I did notice that one of the Gulfstreams belongs to our company’s fuel supplier, Conoco Philips. I only hope they were working to get the oil prices back down some with the help of our Chinese friends.

We can cut the air here, as advertised, the smog is pretty bad. Very low visibility on a sunny day. We are at The Raffles Hotel, one of a chain started 199 years ago in Singapore and a well known high scale chain here in China. It is a beautiful place and my room is just terrific. UPDATE! Friday Morning Beijing Time Room update. Well, my room is “mostly terrific.” I found out when the construction crew quits work on the building across the alley from my window…. when the Olympics start in August! Loud arguing in Chinese accentuated the front end loader’s diesel song; punctuated by the cymbal crash of occasional deliveries of steel dropped on the ground by a crane when offloading a truck.

But, the good news is that I can have plenty of time, since I'm starting before 5AM our time, to bring you a little more about our trip. I just uplinked the Shanghai blog and discovered that here in Beijing, just like Shanghai, I COULD NOT LOOK AT OUR OWN BLOG! I've decided that the blog addresses have been blocked by the government here, since you might imagine that you can get all kinds of opinions on blogs on the internet. I know that there are filters in place here that aren't found elsewhere- as we did in Dubai as well- interesting. Anyway, some humor attached-once again- to food. We wandered down the street to the shopping mall where we were told there were many options. We found one 'sit down' style restaurant, we were the only non-natives we saw in the whole mall. We ordered from menu's pictures and then spent the better part of 90 minutes frequently dissolving in helpless laughter as we encountered a number of funny things:

1. Watching Jim rolling noodles up on his chopsticks like you would spaghetti on your fork. No it doesn't work!
2. Trying to identify over a dozen unknown food "items" that would float up in our soup or appear under a pile of noodles or in the casserole of chicken that was the "haus espeshealluty".
3. Trying to decide where the chicken dish fell on the Kelvin Scale of heat. Let me tell you, I do not shy away from spicy food, but this dish made a jalapeno pepper feel like a snowstorm. The rest of them ordered beer, which we discovered came in huge bottles. I started with one Coke, but was driven to another by the chicken dish. While the attached picture taken by my phone isn't the best, the little white pieces that look like snow were the seeds from the peppers from Hell that are what makes the whole dish red in color. WOW! Chernobyl style Chicken in Beijing!

Yes, you did have to be there, but the laughter and the good natured natives in the restaurant made it all a wonderful evening. Jim gave the manager a tip from us after paying the very reasonable dinner bill. I don't think it had ever happened to him before. He stood and looked at the 50 yuan bill ($8.00)in his hand like it was from space!

We are off to tour the town in a couple of hours. More later. Bob