Regular readers will know that Imagethief made his first departure from Beijing's spanking, new Terminal 3 last week. Well, close on the heels of the first departure must come the first arrival, which I made on Sunday afternoon. On the whole it was OK, but the experience left me thinking that, as so often happens in China, imposing grandeur has been emphasized over old-fashioned operational efficiency.

Here's why I come to this conclusion. First, when we taxied up to the terminal, we couldn't park because there was an Air China plane occupying our assigned gate at the international wing. The airport authorities would not allow us to use any of the many open gates, but decided we should wait on the tarmac with four engines spinning until the other plane departed (figures on the Internet --and the Internet is never wrong-- suggest that's about 200 liters of jet fuel a minute burning out into Beijing's already ruined atmosphere). Our bemused pilot kept his planeload of weary passengers amused with a running patter on the situation over the PA. Eventually the controllers relented and let us pull into the empty gate right next door.

Norman Foster's terminal design is graceful and splendid, but it's also long. We parked near the end of Terminal 3E's long "tail" (near the center of the three building complex), and had to walk all the way back to the far end to reach immigration. This was, to put it mildly, a hoof. There are travelators, but as anyone who lives in China knows, Chinese travelators are not exactly lickety-split. It took a while.

The great benefit of business class is that you can beat most of the plane-load to the immigration counter. This is important in Beijing, where T2's immigration area is often undermanned, leading to queues that can reach the back of the room and then fold back on themselves (although it has got better in recent years). I had hoped that T3 would feature an overhaul of the immigration area design. No such luck. There are what seem to me like relatively few counters for the world's biggest terminal. When our planeload arrived, only four of the ten counters for foreigners were manned, although they did open more counters after a few minutes. But most surprising was that in a terminal roughly the size of the Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein there is still not enough space for the queues. It took only two plane loads of people for the area to fill and the lines to start curling back on themselves. God knows what it will be like when the terminal is operating at capacity. Take a number and wait.

Which leads me to my last point: From the pier to the parking lot, which is in the next province over, there is still not a single bookstore. They may have them in the domestic wing (T3C), but there is zilch in international.

If I may delicately pose a question to BCIA management, WTF!?