Good day, Avid Reader! I write from Australia, but wanted to share a bit of a travel adventure: with a layover in Tokyo on my way to Sydney, we were told to stay in our seats such that the Tokyo Quarantine Team could enter to check for swine flu. I thought to myself, "self, aren't we already in Tokyo? If one person had it for the past 10 hours, wouldn't the majority of us have been exposed?". But that's just me.On to the plane came a swat team of what would have looked like ER surgeons, if not for their belts of disposable thermometors, clipboards, and high-tech-looking LASER BEAMS! OK, OK, I exaggerate, but we did get an aisle wanderer with a heat-sensing gun finding out who "had the temperature" and ultimately who would be subject to further swine flu tests. I was pretty ticked off that the woman who coughed (mouth open, mind you) all the way across the Atlantic told the interviewing surgeon that she hadn't had a cold or cough in the past 10 days. Given the heat gun didn't bust her, I had to let technology win and admit that she was just rude, not swine flu-ridden.
After removing two people from the plane for quarantine, I suppose they felt the rest of us would be acceptable into Japan -- at least the airport -- to pass what germs we got on to the rest of the travelling world!
1 comment:
on my way into Hong Kong passport control they pulled me out, gave me a mask and walked me across the airport to a shipping container with a makeshift doctor's office where they took my temperature, asked me a bunch of questions, gave me a tutorial on swine flu and then sent me on my way. It added 65 minutes to my 15 hours of travel. Nice.
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