Today’s one-day in’n’out trip was the first time I have flown into Shanghai Pudong airport. With my company’s office in Puxi, I normally fly into the unglamorous but pleasanter Hongqiao, which has less of that THX1138 feel about it.

Speaking of weird, dystopian futures, on the way in we took a cab rather than ride Pudong’s notorious maglev train. On the way back however, I told my colleague Xinhua that I wanted to try it. My exact words, delivered in the best juvenile spirit, were, “I wanna ride the goddamned supertrain!”

And so we did. It’s pretty swish, literally and metaphorically. Siemens’ now-defunct mobile phone division (they paid BenQ to take it out and shoot it; 回收手机公司!) briefly had a line of phones called Xelibri, the slogan for which was the unforgettably ungrammatical “That’s so tomorrow!” (In Chinese: 好明天啊!) The phones were hopeless, but I loved the ad campaign and the slogan. That should have been the slogan for the maglev train, also, coincidentally, built by Siemens. It’s like those Germans are everywhere.

Eight futuristic, whiz-bang minutes from the train station to the airport. The whiz part of the whiz-bang was provided by 300kph of smooth maglev power. The bang! part --really an alarming double-thud-- was provided by the shockwave from passing the train going in the opposite direction at a closing speed of 600kph. The otherwise smooth and speedy trip was spoiled only by the twenty-five minute taxi ride from Central Pudong to the train station. It must suck to run out of construction money halfway to your destination. “That’s so half-assed!”

And speaking of cheap, we took the train in the evening, and so got discount tickets at only 40 kuai a pop for “economic” class. In a train designed to carry several hundred there were, by my count, fifteen passengers including my colleague and me. At 40 kuai a pop, that’s a big 600 kuai in ticket revenue to keep those big electromagnets fired up. “That’s so bankrupt!”

Note to the operators: If that train is ever going to be a success, you need to run it clear down to a station next door to the Mingzhu Tower (that spiky-ball building you see in every Shanghai-Pudong skyline shot), and then you need to go further and terminate it in Puxi at Nanjing Road. Then it would actually be useful. Better yet, run it all the way to Hongqiao on the far side. I know, what with maglev track costing something like $1 trillion per kilometer, that’s unlikely, but it will give you a better business case.

Now the flight had some issues as well. First, we were delayed a half-hour out of Pudong. OK, no big deal you think. Then, after landing in Beijing, we pulled into an isolated section of the apron and sat there for twenty minutes. I thought we were being quarantined. But, no, it turned out that there was no jetway available for us.

Easy, you would think. Roll up one of those mobile stairways.

No mobile stairways.

One hour. For a two-hour flight from Shanghai, we sat on the tarmac in Beijing for one hour, amidst much angry squawking from my fellow travelers. It was 1AM when we got off the plane.

“That’s so fucked up!” 

My colleague suggested that next time we should fly China Airlines rather than China Eastern. China Airlines is the 800 pound gorilla at Beijing Capital Airport, while China Southern has its own terminal. Shanghai Airlines code-shares with China Airlines. In terms of landing and parking slots, that seems to leave only the scraps for China Eastern and the other regional carriers.

One hour.

As the packet of dates I was given on the flight said, in hopeful Chinglish: “Welcome to chain our flight!”

Quite so.