Review of China Eastern flight from Xi'an to Beijing in Economy

This Flight Report was is a so-called archive report , using the few pictures I had taken before the launch of this website. I nevertheless found the original BP, in a thick unsorted pile of BPs of all dimensions and colors. The ones on thermal paper are sadly discoloring to oblivion, but all damage this one had was the blurring of the blue stamp at the BP check, possibly from Day 1 due to the nature of the thick paper.

The plane I flew that day makes even more of an archive, because MU does not operate A300-600s any more. This aircraft registered B-2330 entered service on 1 March 2003, some 30 years after the first one did, and was sold off by MU on 14 May 2015, according to Airfleets. I had not realized at time of flying that this was already an oddity in the Chinese skies, where latest technology aircraft are the norm.

She was only seven years old at time of boarding, but the central CRT IFE screens betrayed the age of her design.

Bad luck, there was a rather large group on that flight, easily recognizable thanks to their white caps that these vacationers were wearing. During the whole boarding process, they were calling each other so loud in all directions, th way the Chinese can sometimes do, that I felt like in a hen pen.

It was maybe the first flight for some of them, from the time they were taking reading the safety card that frequent flyers seldom care about (and because this was Year One Before Flight Report, I did not take a specific picture, but you have an idea there)

It was unusual for me to take a morning flight, and this was an opportunity to discover the Domestic Chinese flight version of a breakfast. It was not very exciting, but you don’t get that in Economy on a flight of that duration in Europe or the US.

According to the time-stamping of my pictures, the flight was perfectly on time, which was far from being the norm, then and now. I did not take pictures of the airport in Xi’an, but went to the toilets in PEK landside and discovered that the urinals were water free. Well, it was a interesting way to save water (Beijing’s growth exceeds its water supply potential), but quite frankly, these toilets stank.

This is the end of this archive flight report, and it is so short that I decided to pad it with a Chinese menu bonus. This had been a business trip, and the venue was in the most unexciting Chinese suburb I ever saw, in a developing area next to Xi’an’s third ring road, in poor weather, as exemplified by the view from my hotel room.

The view from the hotel was dismal, but the dinner with my local partners was well worth the trip. Not for the good food which was served, but for the way it was listed in the menu. It had the most extraordinary collection of Chinglish I ever saw, and I thought it was worth sharing these quaint translations.
The translator provided unwearied effort on this one : 马面鱼, pronounced [Mǎmiàn yú] in Mandarin, is a leather jacket fish.

This eight fingernail fish looked like an octopus. Its nephew the squid’s son is very bashful.

Chicken feet are exactly that. This is a Chinese delicacy, and you have to be a native to appreciate it, IMO. The translator did not quite know the difference between shredding and ripping. 卤 can be halogen, but salt too, and the pork was simply salted.

In China, garlic is so strong that it can rip a sheep

I’m not sure there are salmons in the North Pole

We did not choose this salmon, on fears that it might rip our body. The Senate was indeed distant, and I did not check if it was punctured.

Would you have ten thousand emotions at the sight of this dish ?

Deity powder ? I admit not knowing what 神仙粉 was really.

I noted at the time that I chose "Fries you the surface", and there was expectedly enough hot pepper to fry you stomach surface if you weren’t trained for that.

On the other hand, the “burns the surface cake” was not burnt at all, and quite tasty

Even if your child is rotten, do not fry it !

The translator had 2D and 3D problems. In Chinese, 面 can mean "noodles" or “surface”, and 卷 can mean “volume” or “roll”. Also, in Chinese, diminutives are created by duplicating the word, and there is no explicit plural. 卷卷 are actually small rolls,

… and 棍棍面 are slightly sticky noodles, not a “stick stick surface”. The "manual surfaces" above are simply hand-made noodles.

Food is a lot more diverse (and tasty) in China than in Chinese restaurants abroad, and ordering it can be a lot more enjoyable. I hope you enjoyed this !