Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

The Art of Business Travel- China Style

I've always been fond of traveling, but traveling on my terms. This means lots of lazy days, journal writing, novel reading, and long, luxurious meals. I've never subscribed to the 'if it's Tuesday it must be Belgium' method of hitting as many sights as possible within a limited time frame. Travel for me means independence and freedom; it means not having a fixed agenda. If I want to spend six days on a Thai beach resort doing nothing, I will and not feel the slightest bit guilty about it.

This summer in China I've been traveling more than I ever have. I work as an examiner for an international English-language test which allows foreign students to study in English-speaking countries. Given China's huge population and frenzy for overseas study, you can imagine that there's an enormous demand for our services here. Our job is to fly to various cities in northern China, handle the speaking portion of the examination, and then fly back to Beijing where we mark the writing portion of the exam.

I won't lie- the job has a lot of perks. The pay is great and we get to stay in 5-star hotels, which (for the uninitiated) is quite a fantastic treat. I get to work with a lot of interesting people and see, at least superficially, a number of cities I otherwise wouldn't have traveled to on my own. And- best yet- I have four days a week free in Beijing to do as I please.

But, in an odd way, the job has changed my perception of travel. A friend of mine has been an examiner for many years. Once before traveling together, he said "oh great. Another airport". I couldn't understand what he meant. To me airports have always represented excitement- the last place I see before embarking on an adventure. When I told him this, he laughed. "Try doing 50 flights a year," he said.

I now know what he means. After spending a large amount of time in China's airports lately, I am now aware of the following facts:

- Terminal 1 has a KFC and a Starbucks, while Terminal 3 has a Starbucks, a KFC, and a Burger King. This is vitally important knowledge.

- Toothpaste cannot exceed 100 grams in volume in your carry-on luggage. No exceptions. You can have 5 tubes of 95 grams each, but if you have one at 101 grams it will be briskly confiscated.

- 45 RMB is about the going rate for a bowl of lukewarm beef noodle soup at most airports. Hence the above reference to American fast food joints.

- If there are delays of over three hours- and most flights seem to be delayed about that long- there is at least a 90% chance that some sort of physical skirmish will occur. For all their supposed Confucian passivity, I've seen some startlingly vicious acts from aggrieved Chinese people in airports.

- And in a wonderful example of Murphy's Law, the automated check-in machine will only work if the check-in line is less than 10 minutes long.

There's a funny scene in the George Clooney film Up in the Air in which his character, a man who spends his whole life traveling on domestic flights, lectures his new colleague on ways to minimize time wasted in the airports. Lately, I've actually begun taking his advice seriously. I've now gotten the security check process down to an exact science, knowing exactly which items will pass through and which ones won't. I know now exactly what sized bag will be permitted as a carry-on, and what sized bags must be checked-in. I cringe at colleagues who delay us by checking-in bags on two-day trips, feeling like Lone Star carrying Princess Vespa's giant hairdryer around in Spaceballs.

The hotels, too, possess their own internal logic. Each has a bountiful dinner buffet, which despite its prohibitive cost still manages to lure quite a few of us each time.  I remember that during my college-era trips to Vegas, the hotel buffet was one of the major draws of the experience. When you're hungry, a buffet looks as attractive as a briefcase full of money. You mean, you can have steak and pasta and tempura and tamales rounded off with French onion soup? Never mind that within minutes you'll be utterly stuffed and eyeing the dessert tray like an alcoholic walking past an Irish bar and then laid out with a food coma so severe that even the hotel's flannel robe doesn't fit. But for some reason, the buffet still has an enduring appeal in hotels, and the ones in China are no different.

One of my favorite aspects of the job is having critical conversations with my colleagues about the various hotels on the circuit. "In the rooms in Harbin you can watch TV from the bath," "The Guiyang place has enormous rooms and a 50-meter pool, but the breakfast buffet is only so-so,". "The Wuhan hotel has CNN but not BBC and they charge 50 yuan for a small beer,". And so on. Foreigners who would have been happy sleeping in a one-star guesthouse on their own dime find the most trivial matters to complain about when ensconced in a 5-star hotel.

An interesting part of the experience are Sunday nights, when examiners flying back from wherever they were usually land in Beijing at the same time. Like kids going home after a week at camp, we all wave goodbye to each other in the taxi queue, but nobody is too sad- we'll see each other again the following weekend.

In a couple weeks, I'll fly to Kunming for a short vacation. I only hope that I'll be able to regain that lost sense of wonder at the prospect of travel. Whatever the case, in the meantime I'm happy to continue my strangely delightful tour of northern Chinese airports and hotels.

Note: An earlier version of this post had "compensated" rather than "confiscated" in discussing the toothpaste limit at airports. Error fixed.