At this seat, they hadn’t replaced the water, and I noted the still water was
supposedly from Canada.
“The Production of Canada”… right.
Nice view of ORD on approach:
We landed significantly early - this seems to be the norm with China Eastern’s schedule, which is excessively padded.
Unfortunately, the L2 door was used, so we were behind some business class customers in disembarking. On the other hand, I could take a picture of the business seat:
As expected, there was no “welcoming party" for First class passengers. Unfortunately Global Entry was down, and I couldn’t use the automated kiosks because of my particular visa. This meant I had to fill out the form and go to a counter, where I explained everything about my visa to the agent, who promptly stamped me in as a tourist. “Excuse me, but I actually should enter as an O1!” Oh! Right! She proceeded to cross out my stamp and “fix" it by hand. The baggage was already on the belt by this point, but we were delayed again as we were sent to secondary, where the Chicago Polish mafia was in full force and laughed that we got secondary. Finally, United decided that the baggage tag “doesn’t scan" and had to reprint it. Welcome to the USA, I suppose...
Final thoughts on the flight - absolutely a fun experience and very practical in my circumstances, but I would not go out of my way to fly China Eastern again. It was a quintessentially Chinese state luxury experience - the basics right, but the essence wrong. China Eastern First class ranked highly on some points, but on the other hand the food quality left a lot to be desired - ultimately that’s what first class is largely about. (I should add, just to make it clear, this is definitely the worst First class food I have ever had.)