„Пътуването до Тянанмън“ Документален филм

I landed in the Vancouver airport. My friend Zenon was on the plane before me. We met in Vancouver separately because we didn't want to have anyone follow us from Toronto, anyone from the Chinese consulate. He walked by me wearing a shirt with a big Canadian flag on it and he just kind of pointed at it like, go buy one, because I didn't have anything. But I didn't want to go get one, because I didn't want to do anything, I just wanted to sit there. I didn't want to move. I didn't want to talk to anybody, I was just too scared. November 15, 2001. Two Canadians, Joel and Zenon, boarded their flights to Beijing. For them, this was a journey full of uncertainty. This is real. This is not a fun story. I'm going into a police state, which is attacking and killing the thing that I defend, and I've just called the murderers to the whole world on the media. They don't like me. We've had a recent report of 15 women tortured to death in a northeastern province, and just a few days ago we got in the same province, 10 men tortured to death in the same province, and these are all on the same day, so these are mass killings. These are not just rare incidents. Their entire life is bombarded with persecution, from their workplaces to their schools. They're dehumanized in the eyes of Chinese society. If they go for legal representation, the lawyers are persecuted. There's nowhere else for them to go except into the public to show their innocence. So they go to Tiananmen Square, and as Westerners, we must support them. Zenon and Joel practiced Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that originated in China, which was then persecuted by the country's atheist regime. Besides them, over 30 people from 11 other countries left their homes and boarded flights to Beijing. Other than their travel companions, most had no idea who else was on the same fateful journey. Peter grew up in a small village in the former East Germany, and later moved to Frankfurt. He was a wrestler since childhood, but was more interested in martial arts and Chinese culture. He was amazed how the simple and slow exercises of Falun Gong gave him such strong energy. The aches and pains from his old wrestling injuries vanished. When we decided to go to Tiananmen Square, we asked people from other European countries if they wanted to go. We just booked a plane ticket and went to Tiananmen Square. We didn't have a plan or a plan B, but we just went. So some people said, OK, let's go. Somebody made me a phone call from Germany, a friend I know, and she asked me, Perio, we are going to Tiananmen Square, do you want to go? And I just told her, OK. So it's now then. I've been waiting for this. Of course I will go. For two years, Perio had thought about going to Tiananmen Square. Before the persecution started, Perio thought of China as her second home. Since 1995, she and her friends had been spending their Christmas holidays in China every year. They did Falun Gong exercises in parks and shared their practice experiences. But since the beginning of the crackdown, Perio lost contact with all her Chinese friends. Perio's friend, Enei, had also been to China. In October 1999, she was at a secret press conference in Beijing, where her friends, at great risk of being arrested themselves, revealed to media what practitioners were suffering in the persecution. And we held this conference, the press conference. One Chinese girl called Ding Yan, she told her story how she had been persecuted, handcuffed, and she showed for the foreign media. And they also did the practice, showed the practice movements. And also a small child, I remember a small boy, together with their parents, and he also told me that he can't go to school because he practiced Falun Gong, so he's not allowed to go to school. And he felt it was, he was like 10 years, 29, 10 years old. I felt they were very brave to do this because I know what could happen and what was going on. Most who spoke out at the press conference disappeared or were imprisoned. Ding Yan was tortured to death at Chengde Prison. Cai Mingtao, the interpreter at the press conference, was killed too. It wasn't a hard decision for Enei to protest at Tiananmen Square. When I first heard about the trip to China, it was through my friend Myrna. And she just came up to me out of the blue and said, do you want to go to China? And I just said yes. And at that time I didn't have any thoughts. You know, I didn't have to consider would I go or not because I was already looking for anything that I could do to help raise awareness about the persecution and try to help stop these innocent people getting killed. The first time I read about a practitioner dying in China, it was the case of Miss Chen Zixiu, an elderly woman, and she'd been beaten and tortured to death. And already the persecution was unbelievable enough, but here someone was killed for doing the same thing that I do, Falun Gong, freely, in Australia. And I cried. I cried when I read her story and read what happened to her. It was so sad, it was so devastating for me. Kay and Kate planned to go to Tiananmen too. This would be their first time going to China. If it weren't for their practice of Falun Gong, they wouldn't have had much connection to that place. Kate grew up in a small town that only had one Chinese family. When she entered her teens, she became addicted to drugs and alcohol. Kate never imagined that Falun Gong would help her to heal. Her friend Kay discovered free Falun Gong instructions in a newspaper ad while searching for meditation to cure her illnesses. I've had so many health benefits, so many spiritual benefits and improvements in my relationships with everyone, my family and friends, that what would happen if someone asked me to stop practicing Falun Gong? I wouldn't do it. So I could understand why the practitioners in China wouldn't either and why they would go and appeal and even risk their lives. And that was when I had the opportunity to go to Tiananmen Square. That's why I went. It was something that I could do. I thought more about the Chinese citizens who were deceived by the Chinese regime into thinking that we were a cult and that was so unfair. I really want to talk to them, to have them see, look, we are white, we are from so many countries and we practice Falun Gong. Do you know that? I think a lot of Chinese people didn't know. I've been working as a film editor for many years and very often I had interviews with Jewish people and they were speaking about the Nazi regime and I understood so deeply how much manipulation comes out from media and how the Chinese government is limiting its own people. For me it really was a matter of life and death that I was contemplating. Lillian was in Beijing the year before. She frequently visited Tiananmen Square and witnessed police pushing, beating and arresting Falun Gong practitioners. The one thing that I remember very clearly is one of the times when I was there. I saw them arrest and beat a female practitioner and there was like a police barrier type of fence and there was a policeman who pushed her against it and did this very violently many times until she just fell and collapsed on the ground like he crushed her. That was very shocking and later when I came back to the UK I learned that on that day a practitioner died on the square and I had a feeling really it was her. It was so unreal. They were like beasts. They weren't like humans. At the time the decision for me to go to China was the most serious decision that I'd ever made and I know everyone had difficulties to overcome, obstacles. Should I tell my parents what will happen if I'm arrested there? What will happen at work and at school? Everybody that I was speaking to, and I too had some difficulties and was low on money and had to sell possessions including one of my saxophones to be able to go to China. Born in Israel, Li Shai studied Chinese at a college in Los Angeles. Before he decided to go to Tiananmen, he called to tell his parents. We saw how well the experience of practicing Falun Gong has been for him in terms of his health and becoming more calm and we saw the benefits it brought to him but we never thought that he would take the step of going to China. I was totally shocked and became very worried. The first thing I told him was what if they frame you with drugs or something in the suitcase? They can fabricate any kind of crime and then you'll go to a labor camp and we'll never see you again. We'll never know what happened to you. I had this very deep existential fear that something would happen to him and it was just very scary. I called them and went to sleep. The next morning, I felt like a mother who had lost her son. I don't know why, but it was very painful. I wrote a letter to my parents and I told them that when I was a child, they told me stories about human rights, Martin Luther King, Gandhi and they told me about non-violence, their patience and what they had given up. I'm not Martin Luther King and I'm not Gandhi but those historical figures, if they didn't do what they should have done because of their parents' fear, then what kind of world would we live in? So I wrote this letter to them and went to sleep. The next morning, I woke up and I had a very clear feeling in my heart. I knew that my parents had answered me and I knew that their answer was very positive. I opened my mailbox and saw their e-mail. I wrote a sentence, We understand and we support you. The plan spread quietly from friend to friend to avoid Chinese authorities finding out. The plan was to gather at the flagpole at 2 p.m. November 20, 2001 to hold a big banner together. We arrived in Beijing at the Beijing airport and got to see a little bit of the city. When we went to our hotel, there's a small group of hotels where the Westerners stay and there were police at the escalators and in the lobby and we were being watched the whole time. So we were very cautious. We come into the hotel room, we close the blinds, we keep the lights off, we speak to each other in a very low voice and we were just very cautious. We wanted to make sure that we'd have the opportunity to make our appeal later that week. And we had a meeting beforehand, before our actual event, with a few of those people who were coordinating and planning and just talking through what would happen on the square. My role in the event was to film, was to secretly videotape the entire event. To do this, I had to figure out how because I knew there was going to be police all over the square and if I was standing there with a video camera, I was going to get arrested as well. So it took me a good week to figure out how to do it and I sewed it into my strap of the backpack. I put a hole in the backpack so the lens could fit perfectly in my backpack and then the string went down the strap into the back of the backpack and into a camcorder. It took me a good four days to master how to use the camera. I went to Tiananmen Square a couple of times. I also went to a jade ring and jade factory. I bought a ring for my girlfriend and told her that if I could go back this time, I would marry her. The last time there was Kate, myself and Chris from Australia and John from America and we'd become friends with a waiter and we had a lot of fun making jokes and trying to communicate in English and broken Chinese and as we were leaving, we wanted to tell him about why we were there because we knew we wouldn't see him again. So Kate and I had made these little cards with three Chinese characters on them that said, truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. That's what it meant in English. We handed him this card at the doorway and straight away his face turned from this big smile down to panic, fear. His hands were shaking holding the card. He was looking up at us four Westerners, really tall and back at this card and up at us and back at the card and we said to him, Falun Gong is good and what the Chinese government is saying is wrong and it took some time for him to change. His face started to relax. He eventually took the card but he took the card and he put it very close inside his shirt pocket and then he started to smile again and it was like seeing how how much the propaganda in China had made people afraid of these three words that are so good, truth, compassion and tolerance. And he waved us off all the way down the street smiling and waving and watching us as we walked to the corner and I think that that made an impact on him. It certainly did on me. I am. Oh, we're walking? In the right spot? I kept it recording. Perfect. We've come here to the Great Wall to hang our banners. In my heart, I kind of think of the Great Wall as a nice place to do it because a lot of people from around China come to the Great Wall and they'll be able to see the banner. I made this banner in my hotel room last night. It was very tedious and I did my best so when Chinese people see it that they're touched by it and it doesn't look just like a makeshift banner although it is. This is my banner. The Chinese media day in and day out was spreading so much propaganda about Falun Gong but so many people had so many real benefits where their health got so much better and they were able to continue living and enough people around them knew that the campaign against Falun Gong was failing. But that changed in the beginning of 2001. The day before Chinese New Year 2001 in Tiananmen Square five people set themselves on fire. China's state-run media immediately declared that they were Falun Gong practitioners. Graphic footage was televised repeatedly. A new wave of hate propaganda was launched against Falun Gong. It was a kind of pressure. The neighborhood committee would look at you and your neighbors would look at you. You know, that kind of pressure. After the self-immolation incident the Chinese Communist regime intensified its anti-Falun Gong propaganda. Even elementary school students had to declare their support. More and more Falun Gong practitioners were expelled from their workplaces and schools and thrown into prisons labor camps and brainwashing centers. But it struck me as being extremely suspicious if not totally phony to create these incidents and then point them to use them as examples for propaganda purposes. And I think in this case there were reporters who questioned this whole scenario who were in China and who basically cast doubt on the whole scenario showed that it was staged and was phony. Washington Post journalist Philip Pan went to investigate the backgrounds of the people involved in the self-immolation. Neighbors of Liu Chunling one of the people who died in the incident said she worked in a nightclub. No one ever saw her practice Falun Gong. In an analysis of the footage of the burnings Liu is walking. The fire on her is mostly extinguished when all of a sudden a heavy object hits her head and knocks her to the ground. A man in a military coat suspected of throwing the object is also captured on camera. However, state-run media reported that Liu died from the flames. They turned Tiananmen Square into a movie set and they used movie techniques of close-up angles of many different cameras to try to create something but that obviously raised more questions than it answered because it wasn't just a news cameraman having to be there and coming across something. It was staged. When I thought about the self-immolation incident that happened in China and the impact that it had in China I felt that my presence there would definitely make them have to step back for a moment and re-evaluate the situation and then start taking the information in again from a fresh perspective rather than all this piled-on confusion. And from that point of view I felt like I was doing my part to erase the impact of the self-immolation incident. I remind myself that I was there for other people and selflessness is a very powerful, powerful thing and to focus very hard on melting into that principle. And after doing that for a number of hours I was very calm. I felt like each step I took shook the entire earth underneath me. I was just so grounded. I saw Paulina whom I knew from California walk by and her two young daughters arm in arm and I was very surprised to see her. I didn't realize that she was actually going to come to China. Joel from Canada who was there and I saw him there. He was posing as a tourist and so I knew Joel really well but I walked right by him because I knew that you can't kind of enmesh him in what we're doing here. He's a tourist so we just kind of walked right past him. And we looked around and then spotted Myrna who was just from Australia and she was walking towards us. Then there was another woman came from Europe and we recognized her from the airport. And then another person came and we all started saying to each other Are you? Are you? Are you? And nodding and there was a kind of excitement because it was real. It was like, oh this is really happening now. At that time I saw the Heng Fu and it opened in an instant. At that time the sun was shining on the Heng Fu so I saw the golden light flash. As soon as I saw it I took the photo very naturally. I just felt it was the most righteous thing I have ever done. To sit there and stand up for truthfulness compassion, forbearance. To stand up for those three simple words and for the practitioners in China. When the banner came out of the bag it was so tall that we had to hold it high above our heads and all I could see was just this golden fabric in front of me. I was just feeling that happy that we were able to do it. I was between the character Chen and Shan and when I saw the photo of that day I could see the little bumps in the banner where my hands were. And I felt really proud because they were holding so strong and they were pushing so strong to hold the banner. When my daughter left I saw the people who took the photo they were actually transporters because they were driving the tourists away Vans started coming in beeping their horn like crazy police started blowing their whistles all over the square and the vans came and they started to circle the practitioners and plainclothes police that I didn't even know were there were in the square and they were pushing away tourists and people with cameras and they were grabbing cameras from people. The banner started to get pulled and pulled and pulled I kept holding and holding and then it got tied up into a rope and then there was a big tug of war between the police and what not. Suddenly the policeman came to pull me by my hair because I don't want to stand up. One by one along the row of us holding the banner practitioners were being pulled off and taken into vans and other vehicles that surrounded us. Chris was trying to brace himself from being put into the van like this and so one of the policemen took one of his fingers and snapped it back and actually broke his finger. Suddenly I was the last one and I was holding the banner and I pulled it down lower so that I could look over onto the other side and see what was on the other side of the banner and I saw I was holding the character for compassion and in front of me were five to six police officers coming closer and closer and I thought let them see what I'm being arrested for and I'm not going to let them take this banner and so I held on really tight and they came in and they started pulling me and pushing me, they were ripping my hair and pulling my bag to try and make me fall over. Then I remembered I had the banner in my leg and I said, you know, don't leave the group you're here as part of a larger group, this is not about you and then I said, well if it's not about me then it's about making sure that the whole world here has fallen off a hill. So I got clear in that moment and I said, alright, I'm going and I got up and I started to pull the banner on my leg and I started to run. When the police got to me it was just threw my right to the ground and I remember catching the ground and the cement smacking my hand and I was like, ooh I almost broke my face and then they picked me up and there was three of them but because I was fighting they all had to hold my arms and my body so they couldn't cover my mouth and so I started hollering and hollering and I saw the practitioners being pushed in the vans and then one by one the vans started to leave and I could see the practitioners in the windows of the vans and I continued to be righteous for them and send my energy to help them be strong and just like that it was over. I grabbed a rickshaw actually and went back to the hotel and as soon as I got into the lobby I went into the bathroom, I didn't even go up to my hotel room, I went into the bathroom in the lobby, I locked the door and I got the camera out of the bag and I rewinded it and my heart was pounding out of my chest because I wanted to make sure that I had this footage and I looked at the footage and it was there. The footage was there. Joel rushed to a FedEx office and shipped the recordings back home getting the news out of China. He then boarded a plane back to Canada. We got a phone call from Sarah, his girlfriend at the time and later became his wife telling us that she heard that they were arrested and we pretty much expected it because Lishai told us in advance that there is a good chance they'll be arrested and then I had the mission because Lishai told me what I'm supposed to do so I immediately channeled all my fear and all my worries and all my concern into action and since I was a professor of communication I had many many connections with journalists and media people and I started making phone calls to all the editorial offices of major newspapers and television channels in Israel and making connections and I was interviewed in many many channels. I held the press conference at the end I was taking some questions and one of the reporters actually asked me if I was afraid for Zenon and I said to them I wasn't afraid but I was concerned that they wouldn't let him come home and I was concerned that no one knew where he was. The councillor general's office told me was that China is not responding to any of the embassies and at the earliest it will not be until this evening before they can confirm or deny any reports at all. The two mothers' fears were not groundless. Just one day before Zenon and the others were on the square the mother of Yang Xuegui an army veteran from Lanzhou city published an open letter online calling for help for her son who was being tortured because he practiced Falun Gong. In the same month international media reported that Hu Qingyun a superior court judge from Jiangxi province died in custody after serving just two months of a seven year sentence for his belief in Falun Gong. I've had discussions in the past about China's approach to the Falun Gong. This time I've been particularly focusing on how they treat individual Falun Gong members. And my message is that they have human rights that must be respected, that we get many cases of complaints of ill-treatment, of torture, of heavy sentences for wanting to simply express membership of Falun Gong in a peaceful way. As the news spread, the protesters were being beaten and thrown into police vans. They had become a thorn in the side of the regime's campaign against Falun Gong. I won't get in the van then, okay. So I push my legs down into the ground and I'm grounding, because I practice martial arts, so I know how to ground myself. So I'm pushing, grounding myself into the ground. All of a sudden I felt a smash in my face and I just sting, shoot up into my brain. And I just start falling over and then I'm getting kicked and hit into the van. In the van where I was, it was just Zenon and I. And the police had Zenon, they had his t-shirt over his head and down over his shoulders and arms, so he couldn't move and he couldn't see. And they were all, the crowd around him, beating into his bare back. And at that moment, I think all the courage that I'd mustered up and all the plans that I'd had, you know, for how brave I was going to be, they were out the window for a little bit. I thought, I have nothing to do in this van, I'm going to talk to the Chinese people and tell her what we came here for, that we are Falun Dafa practitioners. I said it in Chinese. There was a young, very young policeman in front of me who was very upset that I would dare to do that. So he took the sandal of my bag and tried to strangle me on the seat. And then I thought, wow, he's so young and it's automatic for him. He does that every day. He put me in the last room on the right side of the corridor. It was like a movie. There was a good cop and a bad cop. There was a policeman who was very fierce. There was a policeman who almost didn't speak. He had a kind expression on his face. He wasn't particularly good, but he was just a little numb. And the first thing he did was give me his passport. And I told him, I didn't do anything wrong. You shouldn't have arrested me. Why should I give you my passport? I'm an American citizen. I'm praying in there. The U.S. Constitution allows me to pray. And then he saw that I didn't give him my passport. He started hitting me. And then my chin came out. I couldn't speak for almost a day. And then he grabbed my nose, pulled it out, and threw it down. And then he kicked me down. The look in the policeman's eyes when he hit me was that he hated me for being a Westerner. His look was, you're not a Westerner. I'm going to kill you now. I hate you. I can't. I can't. We were all taken to a cell in the basement under Tiananmen Square. And when I first got in there, I couldn't believe that they could shove us all, so many people, into one very tiny cell. And then as I started to look around the walls of the cell, I could see marks that looked like someone's fingers had run their hands down, and there was some, like, dirty kind of bloody stains there. There was a drain hole in the bottom on the concrete floor, and it was as if you could just wash everything off, blood or any beatings or other damage, just wash it off all down the hole. And I sat there and leaned against the wall, and I felt uncomfortable being in a prison cell for what? For holding a banner that said, truth, compassion, and forbearance. There were obviously no windows. I imagined immediately how Chinese practitioners would be treated there. They can do everything. There are no testimonies. Nobody would hear. Nobody would say, see anything. Only those who are with them. And I felt they must, they are lost. They are completely lost. It was dark outside when we were taken from the prison cell, and we were put onto these buses. There was lots of buses, and on each bus there was only a few practitioners, but so many police. And we, on my bus, we had to sit by the window, and the police lined the center rows on either front and behind us. And I sat next to a policewoman, and she stared ahead, straight ahead like all the others. I started to talk to her about why I went to China, and I told her about my, how I have, in Australia, I have a good job. I have a company car. I have, my boss supports me. My family supports me. They know I'm here. And after a while, she turned to me and said, Shut up! Shut up! And I was shocked because I didn't, I didn't even know if she really understood English, but at that point I knew. And I turned back to her and I said, Do you realize I came all the way from Sydney, Australia, to China just to tell you that Falun Gong's good? Do you really think I'm going to shut up? They took us from Tiananmen Square to police station in Tiananmen Square, and then later by bus to a kind of secret service hotel. That was my impression. Me, as a German, I felt like caught by the Stasi, which is German Eastern Security Service. What looks like a hotel, but is actually a public security facility. It's all, you know, two-way mirrors and rooms, and it's just crawling with police and who knows who, different agents and whatnot. So we were held in this public security hotel overnight, and we were watched by 40 or 50 young police at all times. I think they were two or three times more than us. And they started interrogating us. They interrogated us one by one. And the police officer who was looking at me started asking questions, which were pretty normal at first. What's your name? What's your address? When did you come? How long are you going to stay? Why did you come? And then they asked who gave you the money, which government gave you the money. It was just they had these concepts, and they were trying to find any way to figure out how we were so, I guess, effective in being able to turn up and hold the banner up there without them noticing. But they just couldn't understand that it was actually because this is really coming from the heart. It's not something that you could pay someone to go and do. And I simply answered the questions honestly. The purpose of the trip was to try to clarify the truth, to tell the Chinese people about Falun Gong, to tell them about the persecution, about what the government was doing to Chinese citizens. After the policeman interrogated me, I signed the police report, which was all written in Chinese. I sat down, and I had second thoughts about whether I should have signed it. He asked me to sign it. I said, first of all, this is Chinese. I don't understand it. However, I didn't do anything wrong, so I didn't have to sign it. In addition, there were so many videotapes. You were there, and I signed your video. You later said I was committing a crime or something. So I didn't sign it at all. ...that he had in his hand, and he brought me mine and showed it to me, and then I immediately grabbed it and tore it up. One of the policemen got really angry and came over to him and gave him, like, to the head like this. He, like, snapped his head back and started yelling at him in Chinese. What did he say to you? He just asked me a question. He asked me, do you know what it feels like to be forced to die? I said, I don't know. Later, that man was driven away by his leader, like, 610 or whoever. He wasn't wearing police clothes. He was driven away. I guess he was worried that the man couldn't control himself anymore. If he continued to be treated like a Chinese person, he would treat us like that. You could feel the longer we were there, the whole atmosphere would lighten up and they would become very relaxed. And I really worry for them. Of all the things that have happened in China, I see them as being among the greatest victims. I mean, look at what they're being forced to do. I didn't anticipate this, but I hope our appeal in China had a lasting effect on them. Because they maybe didn't know Falun Gong very well and they were being fed the lies that are just ridiculous. And they're being forced to act this out. And they're just kids. And at the time, I was chairing a panel. There was an event at the university and I was chair of the panel. And I remember I walked into the panel and I started the panel and I said, I apologize, I'm keeping my phone open because my son is in prison in China and I'm waiting to hear about his release. So I'm apologizing, but my phone has to stay open. And in the middle of the panel, my phone rang and I said, excuse me, I'm running out. And I ran out and we heard that he was released. After 20 hours, they were sent to the airport and deported. And I saw the Chinese Daily in front of me, the English newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. There was an article about a group of Falun Gong students who came to Tiananmen Square. They were sent by foreign forces, Chinese forces. They were given money and we treated them well. We put them in a hotel. And I saw that I couldn't move my chin. The doctor's nose was broken. And Chris's two fingers were broken. And his ribs were broken. And he didn't have shoes. I thought, is it that easy to lie? And somehow the conversation developed. I said, you know, I was in Beijing yesterday on Tiananmen Square with other people who practice Falun Gong. And she said, oh, I practice Falun Gong. I heard about that. That was so great what you guys did. And she started crying. And I think I was crying eventually, too. So I actually met another practitioner, a Chinese practitioner on the same plane as me who had already heard about it. So that alone told me that there was something successful here, that the news got out. I happened to hear it on the radio. I was in Beijing. And then there was this whole piece of news. There were 36 foreigners, some enemies, some racists, some Falun Gong practitioners, and so on and so forth. They were all crying. I didn't hear them cry. I just heard that. You know, the tears came out with a smile. You know? Most of us didn't know. We'd never met before. So we just came together on the square. And then we were locked up together in this situation. But it was so grueling. You know? And everyone was having their own challenges. So I think it wasn't really a time where we sat and got to know each other. And then we all went home. So this is, for me, this is the first time actually coming together. Well, for me, actually, many people I didn't know until today But today, during the parade, I just, I feel like all war veterans meet together. I got, it's not that, but it's a feeling like this. Maybe we know us previous life. I don't know. But I just got that feeling today. I thought of going back to China many times. I envisioned myself getting off the plane many times. I did the same thing every time. I just knelt down and I kissed the ground.