Arrival in China

How else can a vacation start other than with trouble with Deutsche Bahn? The P+R parking lots were basically full by the morning, and I awkwardly squeezed the car next to a tree, a last narrow parking spot that others might not have dared to take. The regional train was over half an hour late, which only added to the frustration. The S-Bahn in Munich, which I had to use out of necessity, was also delayed. So, I arrived at the airport an hour later than planned. I got lucky at security control, as it was quick and there weren’t many travelers waiting. That was different a week and a half ago when numerous passengers missed their flights at Munich Airport due to wait times exceeding 2 hours. Now the vacation can start relaxed since the biggest hurdle, namely the German infrastructure, has been overcome.
At 5 o'clock in the morning, we landed in Beijing (Peking) ten minutes earlier than the actual scheduled arrival time. At passport control, my wife cheekily asks if we can use the automated entry, which is actually only available for Chinese nationals. Of course, we cannot, meaning she can but I, as a foreigner, cannot. However, the officer kindly allows us to use the lane for locals since I already have a visa. Thus, we do not need to stand in line. One can even experience pragmatism in China when it comes to bureaucracy. The request for biometric recognition surprisingly occurs in German. The system recognizes my German passport and switches the display and audio output to German.
Now just to pick up the luggage; I already knew the belt number in Munich, as the Air China app had already displayed the number of the baggage claim in Beijing. When we reached the exit, the taxi driver was already waiting for us. We decided to take a taxi for the 240 km journey to our apartment in Cangzhou: cost 32 euros including toll fees for the highway. The train ride would have been exhausting with all the luggage since, besides the Airport Express, we would need to use the subway in Beijing to get to the station. In Cangzhou, we would have had to take a taxi anyway, since our apartment is in the east of the city and the train station is in the west. All together, it would have cost us around 30 euros for two people. How the taxi driver still manages to make a small profit remains a mystery to me since the toll fees already cost over 10 euros. However, he had previously driven Japanese passengers to the airport and was looking for customers for the return trip via the app. Without us, he would have had to drive back empty, which is why he might have offered a low price. I assume that the Japanese passengers had to cover a significant part of our fare.
Since the apartment needed to be tidied up (much more than we had expected) and we also had to catch up on some sleep due to jet lag, the agenda was clear. But now the first relatives checked in, and in the evening, we had a nice reunion with a niece, her newlywed husband, and my wife's younger sister with her husband around Huo Guo Ji (chicken in a hot pot), the typical regional dish in Cangzhou. However, the next few days initially await several visits to authorities and organizational tasks for us.