Does Xi Jinping really play the piano? Guangzhou, China, as the topic of a post about a trip to Italy may not seem logical, but it is for budget travellers from Australia. It’s mid 2019, Guangzhou Airport.
Guangzhou Airport, the Institute’s gateway to Europe for a second time, has undergone significant, nay, grandiose change. Always cavernous to the point where hapless travelers might wonder if they had got lost and wandered into a series of empty, connected hangars for those failed double-storey planes now flown privately only, by Arab princes, Guangzhou Airport felt the need to extend, and extend it did.
Dimensions at Guangzhou Airport have now been stretched even further and it seems the already scant patronage has shrunk further too, so that, after exiting the plane, I wander lonely as a cloud through arrival, transit and departure lounges the limits of which cannot be discerned and where the few people you see immediately disappear. It’s like being home alone on an eschatological scale.
Telling myself that the world hasn’t ended and that I am in fact merely in China, I keep wandering. I need to get to the next plane.
Following the transit signs, occasionally being bawled at by short-statured scrawny girls (“Transit, transit!”), I get to a desk where I am issued with a form to apply for a temporary visa to the People’s Republic of China, and from where I am waived on imperiously to another desk a kilometre or so away.
At set intervals a pair of uniformed Chinese police, consisting of one man and one woman stand to attention in an exaggerated, almost maniacal way on one-metre high daises, swiveling empty eagle eyes across the vast, empty expanses.
From time to time I have to catch a lift up, then down, then up again and so on. The lifts are silent as you enter them, but when the doors have closed, Beethoven’s Mondschein Sonate is piped into the lift cage. I wouldn’t put it past the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping to be the performing artist, on an upright piano in a cultural centre after supervising a senior cadre self-criticism session there.
To my surprise, I am issued with a temporary entry visa without demur. I can’t think of a single reason why China should object to my entry, but it amazes me anyway that it doesn’t. Being headed for Rome, I also don’t know why I need a temporary entry visa to China, but I have a policy of not arguing with officialdom when things appear to be going smoothly.
I continue on my one-man diaspora through Guangzhou airport. Another lift. Another bit of Beethoven’s moonshine. Another security check and full body scan. Something in the shinbone of my right leg. Metal? Prosthetic? Clear that hurdle. Another lift. Beethoven. Passport check. Lift. Beethoven. On and on I wander and reach an empty, marble-clad hall, windowless and the size of half a football field. At the end, a tiny, brightly-lit opening. A door-opening with a tiny security official behind it. Security check. Passport check. Body scan. Cleared. Lift. Beethoven.
But now I can see some people and a plane at a gate. My plane? Another passport check, though. I hand my laissez-passer over, but – breaking with my policy, I guess – ask the official: “Am I entering China or am I leaving China?”
She smiles!
