Today has been a whirlwind. We're sitting on a plane right now heading to China. Our day started at 1:45 AM, we were on the road heading to the New Orleans airport by 2:30 (thanks to Pop for driving us!) so we could arrive at 4 AM for a 5:20 AM flight. New Orleans to Atlanta, Atlanta to Los Angeles, and now Los Angeles to ShangHai. Then on to Beijing. We're flying China East Airlines and it's been a very pleasant flight.
The plane is huge (4 seats in the middle row and 2 seats on either side.) We take up the entire middle row and we're in front of the movie screen so we've got some extra leg room. An interesting thing happened to us in LA...we were checking into the flight and right next to us was Brendan Frazier (from George of the Jungle, The Mummy, etc.) checking in. If it turns out that his next movie has an Asian theme...we saw him flying over there.
We're following the sun westward so we will be in the daylight a total of 24 hours. Right now it's 11:30 PM and we're exhausted, but can't really sleep because it looks like it's about 2 PM out side. We just crossed the international dateline so it just became Friday. That's the first time I've ever started a new day w/ no night. So far we've watched a couple of movies, read a lot, played some games, and listened to everyone talking in Chinese on this plane. We've even already eaten some Chinese food...the airline is based in ShangHai.
Something funny happened on the plane...but it needs a little background. Taking anti-malaria drugs is optional for the part of China that we're visiting. Malaria isn't really a problem in the major cities. I opted not to take it, but Ginger and the girls took their first dose last week. I was picking on Ginger because the possible adverse reactions listed on her medicine included things like: dizziness, nausea, diarrhea, hair loss, sleeplessness, strange dreams, a desire to hurt yourself, etc. The list is quite comical. Anyway, sure enough she's had a few waves of nausea after taking it and was considering not finishing the prescription. As we were sitting on the plane she noticed a mosquito flying around. A couple of hours later...it bit her on the leg! She's planning on finishing our her prescription after all.
We finally made it to Beijing and we're at the hotel now. We landed in ShangHai around 7 PM. The last 4 or 5 hours of the flight were pretty rough. 14 hours is a long time to sit on a plane. Our flight from ShangHai was delayed and didn't leave until 10 PM...we landed in Beijing at 12:30 AM. We were met by our guide, Rosa, and were driven to the hotel (which was 30 minutes away.) We started our trip at 2 AM on Thursday morning and ended it at 2 AM Saturday morning...37 hours w/ only about 1 hour of sleep in between. Needless to say I'm too tired to write any more.
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