Beijing (Again)...

So we're finally in Beijing, after what amounted to the longest flight in the history of airplanes. Seriously, I thought my last flight to Beijing was bad, but it had nothing on this one. I'm actually considering initiating a self-imposed moratorium on flights to the Chinese capital.

Of course, in keeping with my recent string of bad luck, terrorists just had to get caught smuggling liquid explosives onto an airplane on the same day as I was booked to travel halfway across the planet, wreaking havoc on airports worldwide. (I mean the terrorists wreaked havoc, not me, although I have been known to do so from time to time). As a result of the chaos I had to wait in the security line for almost two hours, which made me miss my flight. Lindsey missed it too - she arrived three hours early, just to give you an idea of the insanity - which was the only positive thing to happen all day. We were miserable, but at least we were miserable together.

So after we had waited for 2 hours in the customer service line - and we were in the front of the queue - they rescheduled us for a flight through Tokyo that left now. We had to rush to the other gate, only to finally get on the airplane and be told that the flight would be delayed for the people who were more important than us, apparently, and still waiting in the security lines. They delayed it three times, and all in all we were stuck sitting on the airplane for two hours before it finally took off. Which might not have been so bad, I guess, if the flight itself hadn't already been nine hours long. They didn't have our vegetarian meals because they rescheduled our flight. We almost missed our connection out of Tokyo. And to top it all off, because we hadn't already had almost 30 hours of sleepless, foodless hell, when we finally got to Beijing we discovered that they had lost our luggage.

Again.

This is a running record. Every time I've been to China, three times total now, they have lost my stuff.

But they always find it again (thank heaven for computers), and thankfully it just arrived. "Just" being more than 24 hours after we first arrived, and almost 60 hours since we first arrived at the airport in Seattle. The two of us are awfully stinky; they took away all of our liquids and semi-liquids, including toothpaste and deodorant, and I checked my second carry-on, which conveniently contained my extra change of clothes, in order to save time at security. Which, by the way, didn't help one iota. In fact, I had to go through extra security, because when you get married they don't issue you a new passport, they just print your new name on a page in the back. This, apparently, makes you a terrorist.

Our stress levels have gone down, however, with the arrival of our luggage, and we're hoping that we can make up for the day we lost today; with no deodorant or extra clothes and no idea where our luggage was we didn't dare brave the mugginess and smog of Beijing. So we took a nap in the air conditioned hotel room instead, which actually might not have been such a bad thing. We're having fun practicing our Chinese with the hotel staff, and we had some really good tofu for dinner. So maybe things will start looking up.

I can say this, though: trips to China are never boring.