I’d only been on a handful of planes in my life. In fact, the single journey to Chongqing almost doubled my life total of flights. I was so unaccustomed to travelling anywhere beyond the borders of the North west of England at that point that the mere fact that I was in Helsinki airport for a couple of hours was enough to spin my head. The first flight was a simple and smooth ride to the Finnish capital from Manchester. As I prepared to board my flight for the middle and longest leg of the journey, it already felt like a dress rehearsal for what would lie ahead in China. As I waited for the gate to open for Helsinki to Shanghai, I was already surrounded by Chinese people, speaking words that I couldn’t make out even after my three-week crash course of Duolingo Mandarin. Out of my depth already, I made my way down the aisle to my seat, already feeling like I was intruding on a world that wasn’t mine.
The flight itself was comfortable. I was surrounded by empty seats, had ample legroom and was kept company by a tiny Fin Air TV that comforted me with the Simpsons movie and Richard Ayoade‘s Travel Man. The flight clock gradually counted down from 11 hours. As the time drew nearer to landing, my sanity slipped further and further away as my sleep deprivation accumulated.
By the end the trip I was teetering on delirium. I dragged my suitcase around Shanghai airport and negotiated the first of many language gaps for a Starbucks coffee. I hadn’t lost my luggage, I’d managed to navigate my why through the still unfamiliar world of international airports and I slowly realised that everything was going well. The third and final flight passed in the blink of an eye and I had arrived in Chongqing.
I was still in a trance in the taxi journey to the hotel. One reason being the troubling view of the world that my first experience of jet lag was building. The other reason, I truly felt that I had stepped onto another planet. My sleep starved brain was incapable of processing the new land unfolding around me. Chronic sleep deprivation eroded away the edges of the world, leaving it overwhelmingly raw and devoid of any sense. Landing in another continent with my mental faculties fading amplified the bizarreness of what I was about to begin.
I was greeted at my hotel by a kindly older woman, unable to say anything to me other than ‘passport’. She led me to my room and shut the door behind me. I collapsed onto the bed, savouring some moments of much needed reflection now the worries had subsided. I had made it. I had departed from Manchester around 20 hours earlier and I had navigated my way to the far East by myself. I was relieved and proud. The task of getting to grips with life in China had evolved from a formless but heavy presence into developing a shape and a smell.
By this point I was starving, so began the uncertain journey of finding myself a meal.
