Please Place Your Flight Attendant in the Overhead Bin, and Other Post-Holiday Travel News
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Flight 888 from Beijing Capital International Airport to Beijing Nanyuan Airport. Our flying time will be four minutes, 55 seconds. Please place your flight attendant in the overhead compartment. Wait a minute ...
A photo circulating on the Internet of Chinese flight attendant lying down in the overhead compartment of a plane is certainly generating plenty of comments. The woman is covering her face, so it's hard to tell her emotional state at that moment. China Daily suggests it's not necessarily all in good fun. "These stewardesses were reluctant to do it but still lifted to the rack due to the concerns of being not cooperative with their colleagues." It does teach us one thing, though: Any notion that your overweight carry-on bag is going to bring the whole contraption down on a row of passengers is probably false.
And with that, we're back. How was everyone's holiday? From various social media posts, it appears that Bali, the Maldives, Xiamen, and Palawan were fairly popular with Beijingers. Please let us know in the Comments section below where you went and if you'd recommend it.
For anyone who didn't spend their money during the first week of October, you're smart: airfares all over the region, nay, the hemisphere, are quite low between now and late November. For example, you can fly to Sydney from Beijing, depending on the dates, on Cathay Pacific Airlines via Hong Kong, for RMB 3,300. Not bad at all for 12 hours of flying time. Also, timed correctly, you can do that flight in the evening, arrive in Sydney by lunchtime, and you didn't miss any work on the day of your departure. How good is that price? Well, compare it to Cathay flying to Singapore, which is about half the distance. That fare is RMB 3,130 or thereabouts (Singapore Airlines is about RMB 5,200). An extra RMB 100+ for Sydney? Hell yeah. Also, the Australian dollar is about one to five exchanging for the RMB, which is certainly better than it was a couple of years ago. Time to head south?
It's also time to remind everyone of a golden rule of China travel: book your next holiday as soon as you return from the previous one. If that holiday is Christmas, you better get a move on, as many flights to Europe and North America for peak days are almost full or sold out. For Spring Festival, which falls on February 8, 2016, there's still hope. On Thursday, we'll talk about where you should be going for the year of the whatever.
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Email: stevenschwankert@thebeijinger.com
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Photo: Weibo
