On the Plane

This was written while I was on the plane...

So far the trip has gone along without a hitch, knock on wood. I worked on Friday until about 3:30 when I got a ride to the airport. Surprisingly, my flight out of Philly took off on time. It took us about 6 hours to get to LA - a little longer than usual because the winds were really strong. The flight was totally full and I was stuck in a middle seat, which I absolutely hate. The only good thing about that flight was that after the movie (which I didn't watch) they played several Grey's Anatomy episodes. They were several seasons back but it doesn't matter, I love that show and it helped make the flight go by a little quicker.

We landed in LA around 9:15 in terminal 8. For those of you who have never been to LAX, it is HUGE. And of course, my flight to Beijing was out of terminal 2 - all the way on the complete opposite side of the airport. The woman at the United desk told me to either take the shuttle all the way around the airport or I could walk out side and cut through the parking garages. I'm so glad I decided to walk outside, the fresh air felt so good. After I finally found my way over to terminal 2 I met up with Laura. She had gotten in on her flight from St. Louis about an hour before me. Both of us were starving at this point so we went through the international security checkpoint and decided to find some food by our gate. Little did we know though that terminal 2 is tiny! We were all excited to eat our last "american" meal before leaving and didn't have many options - basically it was Burger King or some weird Route 66 Grill. We went with the grill and ended up having probably the best tasting chicken fingers ever. While we were there we met some crazy people - 2 guys who had been stuck in the airport for 16 hours trying to get home to Minnesota and 3 crazy woman who were drunk and couldn't believe we were going to China to referee ice hockey. After eating we went over to the Air China gate to get ready to board. This is when it actually set in that we were going to China - the announcements were all in Chinese then repeated in broken English. The first time we heard it Laura and I looked at each other and just thought "what are we getting ourselves into." We finally boarded around 12:10 on this huge, double decker plane. As we were boarding the plane, they were handing out newspapers - all in Mandarin. Everything on the plane was in Mandarin, with the exception of about 3 pages of the complimentary magazine they have in the seats. Laura and I sat next to each other thank god, that way we could just laugh about how we didn't understand a single word they were saying when they were making the announcements. Finally we took off and almost immediately they served dinner - some type of beef/pork lo mein dish. I definitely avoided the mystery meat but the lo mein noodles weren't too bad. Afterwards I passed out for a bit, have read a bunch and am now typing this. We have been on the plane for 8 hours and I'm definitely starting to get a little stir crazy. We still have about 6 hours to go until we get to Beijing. At least there is a little more leg room on this flight than there is on your typical domestic flight, however the thing that sucks is there are no movies being played. Laura and I are going to attempt to watch a movie on my laptop, then try to get a little more sleep before we get to Beijing. As soon as we arrive we are getting a limo to the hotel to meet Stacey, where we are getting picked up to go on a tour out to the Great Wall. I just can't wait to get off of this plane, i've been sitting way too long. I'll never complain about flying out to Colorado again, this flight makes that seem like nothing.