Someone asked me to post about airline choices.

This really depends upon where you are flying from. My favorite is the premium economy from China Southern – leave LA late at night and arrive in China in the morning time China time. You have to force yourself to stay up all day, but then you will sleep that night and the jet lag won’t be so bad. China Southern’s service is excellent, and the food is incredible.

Not so many years ago you had to leave from the west coast to go to China. So, if you lived on the east coast it involved flying to LA (or Seattle or wherever) and then flying to China.

There are so many options now – there are flights that leave from the east coast and go over the north pole. There are flights from Texas to Japan to China. There are some (usually) bargain tickets where the stopover is in Korea.

If you can afford it go for the bigger seats. If you can’t then just prepare to be squished for the better part of a day. It’s not so bad, and (in my opinion) you really shouldn’t pay for the more expensive seats if it will mean you will have to go back to work earlier.

Everyone wonders whether to get a seat for their child. If the child is less than a year then you probably shouldn’t bother, as the child will just want to be held anyway. If you are safety minded then buy a Baby B’Air.

If your baby is small (very small) then you can request a bulkhead seat and on some airlines this gives you a crib that attaches to the wall in front of you. Big babies will not fit in it though.

Always check out your seats at SeatGuru before purchasing them. You don’t want on the back row (can’t recline), nor do you want right beside the bathroom. It’s also nice to know what conveniences you will have at your seat (charging ports, etc).

As for flights in China – just be glad they are usually short. The seats are not as nice as the ones we are used to, nor are they as big. Some airports involve a bus picking you up from the terminal and driving out onto the runway, where you board an airplane that has its engine running – you climb up metal stairs on wheels into the airplane. I have had a bus drive behind an airplane with the engine running and it felt like the blast was going to blow the bus over sideways. It did not, but it’s not something I was expecting.

I think the older airports are kind of an adventure. Of course, most airports are state of the art and many are nicer than most American airports. As with everything in China, there is the very old and the very new.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 10:08 am and is filed under Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.