Flight Review of Air China: from Canada via Beijing to Japan

Travel blog

Air China started its direct flight service from Montreal where I live, to Beijing in 2018. It’s a long flight but inexpensive compared with other flight carriers.

I took a flight from Montreal via Beijing to Osaka, Japan, where my hometown is. It was a reasonable price. The downside was I had to stay one night in Beijing.

The experience of China started at the gate

Most of the passengers were Chinese people. With my Asian face, nobody thought that I was not Chinese when I was sitting at the gate at the Montreal airport. People talked to me in Mandarin, and I responded in mandarin too. It was already China in the small section of Montreal airport.

Food and beverages

They served food twice. The food was OK but the selection of beverages was not big. I had red wine — Great Wall red wine to be precise!

If I can remember correctly, the dinner was either chicken or pork, no choice for vegetarians. I had chicken and it was fine.

As breakfast, they said that there were choices of “Yi mian” or beef with rice. By the way, cabin attendants spoke in Mandarin as default.

There was a young Chinese guy who lives in Montreal sitting next to me, and he didn’t understand what is “Yi mian”. He asked the cabin attendant, “What is ‘Yi mian’? The boy (cabin attendant) answered friendly, “Actually, it’s like this.” He took one of the boxes which were covered with aluminium paper, put it on the wagon which he was pushing and rolled up the silver lid to show us. It was a pasta covered with cheese.

The Chinese guy next to me said, “Ah, I don’t eat this kind of things. Can I have a beef, please?” I said, “I will have beef too, please,” while I was wondering whether he would serve the pasta that he opened the lid to someone else.

The boy attendant said that he didn’t have enough beef. He gave us the other side food without the main dish and asked us to wait.

It seemed that people didn’t like the pasta breakfast. The man, who was sitting diagonally in front of me, took a pasta meal and said, “It’s not good.”

It was a little crisis for the cabin crews. The pasta was way too unpopular. Lots of passengers complained about it, but cabin attendants didn’t have enough beef meals. Then, surprisingly, they somehow managed to find some alternative food which I wondered where had come from. They were Udon noodles and pork if I can remember correctly.

Another cabin attendant served us the beef. The Chinese guy next to me was happy to get it, but I had already lost my appetite. I said to her, “I don’t want to eat anymore. I won’t have it.” She said, “哎呀，你吃吧！(Eh, you should eat!)”, which made us laugh.

It was a long flight

It was a long flight. It was supposed to be 13 hours and 40 mins long, but it arrived in Beijing 50 mins later than the scheduled time. So, it was almost 14 and a half hours flight.

I cannot remember which aircraft it was, but I felt that the seats were smaller than usual. However, passengers could walk around in the plane and could stay around the toilet or pantry area to stretch their bodies, although staying around those areas or aisles is banned in some flights on American and Europe airlines.

The entertainment was not great either, at least for me. If you love Chinese films, you would enjoy more them than me.

After the plane landed, passengers stood up from their seats before the seatbelt sign was switched off. It is also a typical scenery on the Chinese airline flights.

The Hotel in Beijing

I stayed in a hotel which is located very close to the Beijing airport. It was a nice hotel, but I could not connect to the internet anywhere in the hotel including my room and lobby. It was fine for me because I had known that lots of websites that I wanted to connect to were blocked in China, anyway.

Some staff in the hotel didn’t really want to speak English to me. Their faces said, “Why do you speak in English to me, with your Asian face?”

I arrived at the hotel at about eight o’clock at night and my flight the next day was 16:25. So, I had plenty of time without the internet in the hotel. I had already read lots of stories on my tablet, which I bookmarked before losing the connection.

I was totally disconnected — I was thinking while looking at my black laptop on the desk. I’ve heard that some writers and novelists shut themselves in a hotel room or wherever else isolated from other parts of the world to focus on writing. Then, I understood how it worked. No internet, no social media. You have nothing to do but writing. I started revising the draft of my book, which I had prepared before my departure.

The flight of Beijing to Osaka

The aircraft from Beijing to Osaka was an A330–300. It was bigger than the one from Montreal to Beijing. Despite the plane heading towards Japan, most of the passengers were Chinese people again, but the crews were more willing to speak English after they knew I was not Chinese.

The choice of films was better. I watched the Zhang Yimou film, “Shadow (2018)” with Chinese and English subtitles.

It was a three hours flight. They quickly served meal and beverages. The plane was not full but I imagined that they must have brought a plane full of Chinese people back to China after the big Chinese holidays which had started on the 1st of Oct.