China Dispatch - Getting There

It's half the battle, really it is.

You may or may not know that China is like really far away, so far in fact that they are a full day ahead of us, 16 hours to be exact. This wouldn't have been something of great concern to me or really anything I would have known until I got an ambiguous email from Orbitz (with whom we booked our flights to and from China with) 5 days before our departure to China stating that there has been a change to our itinerary. God forbid they actually tell you what the change is in the email.... no, that would be too helpful, they instead make you login to their site to see your account and try to guess what part of your 5 leg itinerary has changed. As luck would have it, I figured it out right away. Our return flight was originally booked on August 5th, and now when I look at the itinerary, it says August 6th. Ok, the problem here is three-fold...

1.) We were planning on coming home on the 5th so we would all have to take another day off from work with this new itinerary

2.) We only had a hotel booked through the 5th, so we didn't have a hotel for the extra night.

3.) And this is the most important part, only the leg from Beijing to San Fransisco was changed to the 6th, the leg from San Fransisco to Denver was still booked on the 5th. Not real sure how they expected us to make that flight.

So I called Orbitz to find out that Air China just canceled the flight on the 5th for no reason and re-booked us for the next day. To make a long story less long, I spent 3 1/2 hours on the phone that day only to be told that they had to wait to confirm the changes with the Air China desk in Beijing, but that it was now the weekend over there so nobody would be working and they would get back to me on Monday. Which was the day before we were set to leave. Not good...I had a bit of a major freak out, there was crying involved, it wasn't pretty.

On Monday... I never heard from anyone so I called back and of course this was the first they were hearing about my situation and had no record of the 3 1/2 hour call I had had on Thursday. By the time we left on Tuesday I had with me a printout of our original itinerary and a new itinerary that had us booked on the Beijing to San Fransisco flight on the 4th and the 6th and still had the San Fransisco to Denver flight on the 5th.

So we left to go all the way around the world for three weeks and had no idea what day we would be coming back or if we were actually booked on a flight at all. No worries! It'd work itself out.
So here we are in our first of many self-taken group shots looking all pretty and ready to head to the airport:

And here we are about to board the 13 hour flight from San Fransisco to Beijing, we still look pretty decent and we're all stoked because we scored bulkhead seats (LEGROOM!!! = BLISS):

Seriously... Look at all that room:

They served us yummy noodles for dinner, it was our indoctrination into the many, many dishes of noodles to come:

And here we are after our 13 hour flight, waiting for the 2 hour flight from Beijing to Shanghai. Not looking as pretty at this point and as you can tell by the expression on Deana's face, we don't smell too good either. Apparently Michael snuck into 1st class and slept in a reclining bed and took a shower because look how relaxed and refreshed he looks. You think I would have noticed him being gone for 6 hours at a time in a plane, but I was blissfully unaware of much going on around me due to Xanax and copious legroom. Ah yeah!

When we finally arrived in Shanghai it was like 11:30 pm and we were all very, very tired. So tired in fact that we thought it was a good idea to take a group shot in front of the airport bathrooms. Seriously though.... Why does Michael still look so good? (not to worry, this will all change the minute we go outside in Shanghai and Michael experiences extreme heat and humidity): We got hustled outside of the airport into an illegal taxi that was really just some guy in a car willing to take us to out hotel. Luckily Jay had read up on this and knew what to expect to pay for the cab ride and we don't think we got taken too bad. We arrived at our hotel very cracked out and very surprised that it was like 100 degrees after midnight. GEH!!! Thank god for air conditioning and a bed! We all retired for the evening and were excited to start our long journey the next day.