Whirlwind

My "spirit of adventure" has sure taken a figurative mauling . . . I can successfully say that "yesterday" was the longest two days of my life. Sigh!

Pete drove Reid and I to O'Hare at about 9am; after Reid and I spent a lot of time being lost before finally finding the correct terminal, we waited in line for nearly an hour to check in before heading to security, which also took an hour. We got straight on the plane when we arrived at the gate. At first we felt like it was close (our flight left at 1:07 and we got on at about 12:55pm), but the plane did not end up taking off for another hour.

I have never had a flight longer than a few hours, and I am not a very patient fox. :) It went relatively okay, overall. We watched some odd movies (they also showed an episode of Frasier at one point) and did a lot of reading. Reid and I had the 4 middle seats in our row to ourselves, so I tried to lay down for awhile, but I don't think I managed to sleep much -- maybe an hour or so at the end of the 12-13 hour flight. The turbulence on that flight was the worst I've ever experienced. I've been buffeted around a bit before, but this was like a roller coaster. Both Reid and I nearly threw up during the last 20-30 minutes of the flight, and the nauseous feeling stuck with us for the rest of the night.

Navigating immigration and customs brought us in contact with more long lines; luckily we found out that though they said our bags were checked through Chengdu, they were wrong, and we had to pick them up and check them again. Thankfully we did not lose our bags!

What was supposed to be 2-3 hours at the Beijing airport turned into about 7, as a severe thunderstorm in Chengdu grounded the plane that was supposed to fly out for us. At that point I hadn't slept in over 24 hours. We couldn't get a phone card to work to call the hostel about delaying our check in time and we couldn't get the internet to work - I finally asked the guy sitting next to me to use his phone. He lent it to me, but left after that. I'd also asked him for help with the internet earlier, maybe I was being annoying. ^_^;

I completely passed out on the plane ride to Chengdu; Reid and I weren't seated together. I woke up a few times, but luckily the turbulence was nowhere near as bad.

I have a story about our completely questionable non-taxi ride to the hostel once we finally arrived at 3am local time, but Reid's out of the shower, so it's my turn before breakfast. I'll update some more (with pictures) the next chance I get.

Wish me luck that today goes better than before! I've used a bit of Chinese, but it's very overwhelming and I feel mostly hot, lost, and fairly stupid/incompetent. I'm sort of questioning what it is that I've gotten myself into, and I sure miss home a LOT already. But, I'm hoping as I get more settled in (and maybe I'll get more rest tonight!), that things will get sorted out a bit.