My school has, since a number of years, had a China exchange program with the Yan’an school of Shanghai, during which Chinese students and teachers visit Berlin, and then the BBIS (my current school) sends some of their own students to China. However, it isn’t really an exchange in the classical way, because the students and the teachers spend most of their time outside the guest school and the Chinese visitors stayed in Munich for the first few days and the BBIS students would stay in Beijing for about half of their trip. I’m not trying to say that this is bad, in fact I think that I even prefer this because we get to know much more of China this way.

This year, I applied for a place in the exchange program, and was accepted, and after being visited by the Chinese exchange students last October it is now our turn to visit China. However, we will first stay in Beijing for several days and then later move in with our host family in Shanghai.

The flight from Beijing had a delay of about an hour, and we spent our time buying over-priced drinks and snacks. And while talking with my friends and other people in the exchange program, it was clear that there were pretty much two reasons for us to go to China: one set of people, including me, mainly went there because of the interesting political situation – a singly party dictatorship, yet one of the most powerful countries in the world. The other group of us went there for the standard “touristic” visit, to “have been there” and to see the landmarks and rarely even thought about the political situation.

On the plane of Hainan airways, which is, as they repeatedly let us know, “the first five-star airline of China” we had the choice between two or three Chinese state-owned newspapers and a fairly small and unknown English financial newspaper. The only one of these that I knew was the party-controlled “Global Times”, which has an English online edition, but is printed in Chinese. It is always quite interesting to read their articles as they can sometimes be quite obviously propaganda, such as “why the western model of democracy does not work for China” and similar content.

Even though on the title page the main article was about Russia moving it’s forces out of Syria (and what it means to China), as soon as you flipped the page there was pretty much only coverage of what had happened in the Communist Party of China and other selected and government-approved content.

After again having to wait for an extra half an hour, we got our security introduction by animated characters via the screens on the back of the seats in front of us. I think at this point it is worth noting that I had never before flown on a long-distance flight (my longest flight had been to Egypt up to then), and especially not through as many time zones and hence things like a screen on the seat in front of you were new to me.

Dinner was served shortly after we had passed over Moscow. At this time of year, the sun had already long set. At first, the dinner looked quite acceptable, but then I opened the cover to the warm food. The brown stuff was supposedly chicken, even though it didn’t taste like it. I also had to find out that the cake had nuts in it – which I am allergic to. So I had to limit my dinner to the salad, bread and rice. But oh well.

After receiving and filling in my arrival card, I decided to go to sleep because the forests of Russia as seen from 12,000 m aren’t very interesting at night.