Pathetic excuse for an airport. Had to wait in lin...

Pathetic excuse for an airport. Had to wait in line for 3 HOURS to NOT get a Visa so I could go out of the airport and be back within 72 hours. Had a 12 hour layover there but still, such a waste of time. Everything was so slow there, there were always long lines that moved slower than the pace of a snail. At every point there were always too few people working and they worked INCREDIBLY slowly. Everyone was super unhelpful, unattentive, and hardly anybody spoke a lick of English - it's the nation's capital, how is that even possible? I arrived at 5:30am and literally did not get out of the airport until 9:30am. Once out it once again took ages to get anywhere because hardly anyone spoke English and service was so poor. Was told to wait multiple times by different service people as they turned their attention to something else and yelled at each other in Mandarin. All around it was pretty stressful. The airport is located far from the city centre, took us 40 minutes by taxi to get there so isn't even conveniently located.

When I came back to catch my flight had to catch a shuttle bus for 15 minutes to Terminal 2. Why are Terminals 1 and 2 so far away from the rest of the airport? Then had to wait AGES in line again - and then had to walk down and out onto the tarmac where it was freezing and then catch a SHUTTLE BUS for 15 minutes to the actual plane which was in the middle of nowhere. Seriously?

The plane had a stopover in Hangzhou, where everybody had to get off and wait in line for FOREVER to go through 2 exact same passport security checks - seriously, 2 long lines one after the other for the same thing - before we were ushered onto another airplane with the exact same people who were sitting in the exact same seats. Why the stopover if everything was exactly the same? This was China Eastern Airlines, and coming over to Europe I had flown partway with Air China. Both are incredibly poor. China Eastern doesn't even have a TV screen for a 12 hour flight. Never again. In the future I would absolutely pay more money to fly with a different airlines, and to avoid any stopover at a Chinese airport. The service at the airport and the wait times were ridiculous. Coming from Zurich where I literally completed check in, cleared customs and boarded within 30 minutes - all while running really late - Beijing airport is really pathetic.