From SF to Beijing, is a twelve, 12, hour flight. My goodness is twelve hours a long time. The I was in the airport for two hours waiting for this flight, and the another twelve hours on the flight, plus two more hours before we got settled in our rooms. I was up for close to 30 hours before sleeping, including not being able to sleep well (if at all) the night before.
Back on track. SFO is... interesting, to say the least. Word of advice: just go through the damn machine instead of being patted down. I refused the machine (invasion of privacy hang-up), waited twenty minutes to get patted down, and then tried to go through the machine again. They said no because I refused it once, and now me and Paulina are waiting (sorry girl) for a female officer to show up and pat us down! Finally she arrived, and not only patted us down, but checked underneath our bras (the wiring), inner thighs, and checked their gloves for chemicals that could lead to explosives that I might have handled within the last couple of days. Apparently my deodorant set the machine off but it's OK, "it happens all the time."
The flight was long. Really long. And Air China doesn't have the screens in the back of the headrest for the movies. They only have it projected on the cabin walls, which sucked. But the views were amazing from the windows. I flew over Canada, Alaska, Russia, the Pacific Ocean, and (obviously) China.
I walked around a lot, did homework (this was a school trip after all) and tried to sleep but couldn't. Luckily they served beer and we all got excited about the trip. We were wondering what it was going to be like, but I had some sense since my boyfriend went a couple years back. He showed me pictures and tried to warn me about the heat, even though we were going in June and we went in August.
There were a lot of older Chinese people who kept doing (what we thought at the time) were weird exercises. An older woman was jumping up and down on the plane, holding on to the back of her seat. She would do this for twenty minutes at a time, every couple of hours, then went back to reading or watching the movie/show like nothing happened and it boggled our minds!
Finally we saw it: Beijing International.
We clapped and cheered, full of excitement, grabbed our carry-ons and exited as fast as we could. Now, when I left the states, it was in the low 60's. When I arrived, it was 102. And humid. Very humid. My clothes instantly stuck to my body, I was sweating in places I didn't even know I could sweat, and groggily walked through the terminal. Remember the weird old woman jumping up and down on the plane? She beat us to the terminal, which was about a twenty minute walk away. Then it donned on us: she was maintaining blood flow to her legs and keeping her mind active. Who woulda thunk, huh?
We picked up our luggage, went through custom's, went outside and waited for our bus to pick us up. It took about an hour from the time we landed to the time we got on the bus. Once on the bus, even though we were all exhausted, we were in awe about what we were seeing. It was nothing like we expected. The city was completely modernized, and if you didn't know you were in Beijing, would look like any other big city, minus the Mandarin on the signs.
Most of us still didn't believe we were in China and were expecting to wake up at home with our loved ones. But that wasn't the case. We were in Beijing, and our adventure was about to start.
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