Leaving For China
After a one-day delay, Leigh and I got up at 4:00am on 12.2.06 for a 5:00am pick-up at the house for the ride to the airport. To add further challenge, the water heater wasn't working - the pilot blew out at some point the previous day. In the dark and lying on the cold garage floor in my PJs, I got it lit, but not in time to save our showers...wicked COLD!!!
We got to the arport and made our flight to Chicago. There, we kept an eye on the flight status and readied for the LONG trip to Beijing. The first thing that we noticed was that the passenger list was more than 90% Asian and the Chinese (at least those we've encountered thus far) are pretty aggressive, but not rude.
We were in the second-to-last row of a 747 with 62 rows. The flight was PACKED - every seat taken (almost 600 people). The flight lasted about 13.5 hours and neither of us could get comfortable enough to sleep. We got to Beijing at around 4:00pm on the 3rd. Being a day late, we'de missed the chance to visit the Forbidden City and Great Wall with the group, but were not asked to delay meeting Mary on the 4th. We were exhausted and actually fell into DEEP sleep by 8:00pm. At 9:00, I rose in a panic, believing we'd slept through our alarms and wake-up call and missed our flight to Changsha. We freaked, but figured out we'd only been asleep for an hour and settled back to bed. It happened again, this time Leigh's fault, but at 11:00. When it was all said and done, we didn't need the alarm to get up in time for breakfast and our ride to the airport. The group, which includes four families, met for breakfast, then took off for the Beijing airport and different parts of the country. We will all reconnect in Guangzhou, go through the US Consolate stuff together and travel home.
A couple of pictures: Beijing Hotel Room, View from Window in Beijing, Leigh and I in our last kid-free photo.
posted by Michael Fresina @ 4:33 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home