Sea of Okhotsk, Siberia

Ground Speed 543 mph
Altitude 39,000
Distance to destination 1,807
Distance Traveled 4,293
Time since Departure 7:08 hours
Time to destination 3:21
ETA 1:24 p.m. Wednesday, June 6

On the tarmac of San Francisco International, our pilot announced that we needed to wait until the plane ahead of us was ten minutes out of Russian airspace before we could take off. I recognized in that moment that I had paid scant attention to the route we would take to reach Beijing. As it is summer, the plane is filled with various groups who shall take tours—middle school students and their beloved history teacher, senior citizens who shall rendezvous with others on landing, and our group of over thirty, most of whom are on this flight. It is full. We are all flying in what I affectionately call, “steerage,” and we are packed in like so many cattle. I reminded my colleague, Farzin Madjidi that were we flying to India, we should be in first class—cattle being revered as they are in that nation.

My next realization that we were heading to China came when our flight attendant handed me three forms: a customs form, an immigration form, and a health form. As I reviewed them, I noted that the health form asked me to check boxes if I had any of a host of various ailments including snivel and psychosis. Another question asked if I had been around poultry in the past seven days. I had roasted a chicken two nights ago, I thought, chuckling. Traveling as much as I have in the former Soviet Union, I recognized that as amusing as the form was that should I choose to be cheeky, I would find myself detained in Customs and Immigration. As Agent K said in Men in Black, “We at the FBI have no sense of humor that I know of.” I imagine Chinese officials are similarly predisposed.

The students, faculty, and I have entertained ourselves these many hours with stories in the aisles, films such as Wild Hogs, and the occasional meal. One student noted that she had read that similar to the Indians, the Chinese do not queue.

“What?” I remarked. “The Indians also did not pick that up from the British!”

In preparation for the Olympics, however, the government has designated June 9 and 10 as “Queue Practice Day” in Beijing, and so all citizens must on those two days wait in lines. I understand spitting on the sidewalk has also become forbidden.

Snack Time just concluded and we found in our boxes not the traditional sandwich, but rather a cup of noodles—yet more evidence that life will look entirely different for the next ten days. Following our photographs of our flight attendant reconstituting our noodles with boiling water and much laughter on our parts, we returned to our fourth movie and the final leg of this journey. Under normal circumstances, a cup of noodles would likely not cause such amusement, I recognize, and that something somehow gets lost in translation. It has got to be the altitude, and yet I imagine many more things shall get lost in translation for a while to come.