Beijing Night Transit
The taxi journey to Beijing Airport was very Chinese: a minibus crammed to burst with passengers and luggage pelting down a poorly-lit motorway at 120 kilometres an hour in the small hours of the morning, the only traffic on the road some lorries and a few other passenger-packed “bread van”-style taxis pelting towards their respective destinations. I was in the front, right next to the driver, oscillating my legs to the right whenever he needed to change gear. It was a blast.
I spent half the journey sleeping (he wasn’t changing gears much, once we gained speed), the other half listening to audiobooks (the first few chapters of Prehistory by Colin Renfrew, which was full of interesting things I didn’t know, such as the Scandinavian origins of the terms “Stone Age”, “Bronze Age”, etc., and a little of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel very well-suited to being heard as a spoken story because it is, like all of Ishiguro’s novels, far more concerned with the teller of the tale than with the tale itself) and occasionally glancing at the driver and the his dashboard (for time check, as I was cramped and thus mildly impatient, and for speed checks, as I’m always curious about how fast I’m travelling through space at any given moment). A good journey, overall, and the two hours flew by (or we flew through the two hours, depending on how you look at things).
I’m now in a cafe in Seoul, drinking coffee (a reasonably-priced Americano — had to point at the menu, gallingly), enjoying duty-free Gauloises (the reds, a rarity, for me: have only ever seen them in London, in a small corner shop in a Moscow suburb, and in airports) eating a sandwich (wanted a bagel, but the waitress waved her hands, so I had “white bread” instead), and listening to Korean breakfast radio (random South Korean pop, Taylor Swift, and, a few minutes ago, ‘Unchained Melody’). More on South Korea later; but in short, it feels the same as I remember, only weirder, and more alien (well, I feel very foreign, here, anyway: can’t say much beyond “hello” and “thanks”, and I can’t pronounce those very competently; and I feel self-consious as everyone here is so incredibly smart-looking, and I am, currently, the antithesis of “smart”).
Beijing Airport (Terminal 3), 2010.
