What Day Is It Again?

We have arrived in Beijing and travel was incident free. Well, almost.

Snow in the "mid-west" (is Kansas part of the mid-west?) kept the flight schedules volatile Saturday morning when we were trying to fly out of Wichita. There was very little snow falling there but apparently in Chicago (our connecting destination) there was trouble and our flight was delayed almost two hours. United, though, did an excellent job of making the delay bearable by not having us board the plane until we had an arrival slot in Chicago. They even went one step further by monitoring all our connecting flights and re-booking travellers on the spot before we had even left. I didn't expect this level of service from the notorious airline.

Our flight out of Chicago was not delayed and shrunk our generous three hour lay-over into less than an hour. We caught the flight and joined the mass of college students returning home for Christmas break. Seriously, all of economy-class save a dozen or so people were non-white, twenty-somethings. Speaking of economy-class, we didn't get to see the upper-deck on our 747 but the announcements mentioned passengers in "suites" and it was clear that their experience was quite different than ours. The simple fact that a full plane left very little room for us in economy to even get up and walk around made me realize that we really were travelling the modern equivalent of steerage class. Not that I'm bitter; even that next class up from us cost several thousand more per ticket.

Compared to my previous trans-Pacific flights, time passed very quickly. I spent most of my time watching the in-flight movies and playing video games on a recently received Gameboy Advance. Katie says I'm addicted but I insist I can stop any time. Just got to do this one more thing then I'll be done. I promise. For real this time.

Our flight left Saturday morning, we arrived in Beijing Sunday evening and as I write this, are enjoying Monday morning, the first full day here in China. We'll see if my body can make it through the day without jet-lag taking over.