Saturday, July 10 – 9am
[Whine Warning.]
I shouldn’t complain. After all, I got my beloved Starbucks before boarding the plane… It was my last piece of happiness for the day.
Crazy re-routes. Then 11 hours from Los Angeles to Beijing on an ollllllld plane (think about it – 11hrs with no free movies!). And to throw salt in the wound, my luggage didn’t arrive with me. At least this time, they know where it is. I called Air China at LAX and the luggage was right there, it hadn’t made the connection from Dallas. They said it would be on the next plane (one flight daily, another 24 hours) – so this feels much better than my situation in India when no one could tell me where my luggage was for that week.
So you know what this means. I’m now living ‘on the grunge’. Given that my flight landed at 5am (instead of that midnight flight I was originally scheduled on), and then it took another hour or so to sort through the filing of ‘missing luggage’ reports and planning for getting the bag tomorrow… so I was getting dangerously close to missing my planned tour. I did what every world-travellin’ woman-on-a-mission has to do – I popped into a new t-shirt and brushed my teeth at the airport restroom and I was ready for the day. I take comfort in the fact that the vast majority of Chinese people smoke… and smokers have a terrible sense of smell, so I worried a bit less about not getting a shower after my 26 hours of flight time. Disgusting, I know… but hey, you should be in MY shoes. 🙂