At three in the morning on February the 26th, my adventure to China finally started. It was hard to say goodbye to everyone, but I would only be gone for three months, and this was going to be my adventure of a lifetime. My original flight plan was going to take Kristel (my companion from William Carey) and me from New Orleans, to Chicago, and then from there on to Beijing China. But of course, as luck would have it, our flight was cancelled, and we were rescheduled to take a few other flights. Our new plan would take us to Denver Colorado, and then to San Fransisco before we finally flew on to Beijing. Kristel I think was a little upset, especially since it would give us less time in each place to get to our next plane, but I was perfectly ok with the change of planes. After all, San Fransisco happens to be the home of my very favorite detective, Monk, as well as the future home of Starfleet headquarters. And yes, I do realize that I'm so horribly nerdy, but that doesn't matter, what does matter is the fact that the new schedule pushed up our flight to Beijing by several hours, so that meant our layover from Beijing to Linyi would only be one hour. I was excited at first since we wouldn't have to wait as long for our last flight, but little did I know how much trouble a one hour layover at an international airport could be.
Our flights to Colorado and California went by without much excitement, and soon were were on our half a day flight to Beijing. Let me tell you, that was the most awesome plane I've ever been on. Each seat had a pillow, a blanket, and a little tv with several new American movies. Kristel and I sat on different rows so I ended up next to a young Chinese guy. He seemed to be about my age, but he was already working on getting his PhD, (unlike myself with my measly two years of college under my belt.) His English was pretty good, so we had a pretty long chat before the plane took off. He asked me where we were going, but when I told him the name of the town, he looked completely lost. After several more attempts, I finally had to spell it out, and he said, "Ah, Linyi!" And I said, "Yea, that's what I said!" He then took the liberty of informing me that my pronunciation was terribly wrong. Let's just say, I still have a long way to go on my journey to learn Chinese. On our way to China we flew over parts of Canada, Alaska, and Russia. Looking down and seeing the beautiful landscape made me want to jump right out of the plane and go explore it all.
Madness ensued when we finally landed in Beijing. Our next flight started boarding at 8 P.M. an we didn't land until 7:15! We got through immigration easily enough, and it wasn't hard to find our bags, but after that we were at a completely loss at what to do next! There weren't many people who knew English, so it took us a long time to find someone who could give us directions. Time was quickly ticking away and we weren't even in the right terminal! It was 8:00 when we finally figured out which terminal we were supposed to go to, and to make things worse, we had to endure a 20 minute bus ride across town just to get there. It was a long time after boarding when we finally found our way to the check-in desk, and the plane was very nearly ready to depart. "Maybe we can still make it onto the plane!" Kristel said, optimistically. But when it was finally our turn to talk to the receptionist and ask if there was any way we could still get on, she looked at us and said those few words that no traveler wants to hear, "You're too late." And so, with that, we found ourselves stuck in Beijing.
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