Wednesday, June 20, 2012

CHINA!

May 24th - May 25th

CHINA! Jed and I got the chance of a lifetime and were able to book a trip to China. We were able to find a great deal with Affordable Asia. Our trip was 10 days and we covered 3 main cities; Beijing, Xi' an, and Shanghai. The trip was everything we could have hoped for and so much more.

So lets start at the beginning...

Our trip really started on Wednesday, May 23rd. After work we drove up to New York and stayed with Jed's brother, sister in law and niece. Our flight took off from JFK on Thursday and it wasn't worth the risk to just drive up on Thursday. Besides, it gave us a few hours with the family at the front end of the trip.

So Friday morning, we got up, spent some time with Kerry and Emma before dropping her off at school and then Kerry was nice enough to drop Jed and I and all of our luggage off at the train station. I love taking the train into Grand Central! Our game plan was to take the train into Grand Central, get a slice of pizza and a Jamba Juice for lunch, hop on the subway to the Airtrain and take that to JFK. It was the perfect plan until we got to Grand Central and headed outside and it was pouring! We were pretty bummed but what can you do. So we headed down to the food court and found Two Boots and Magnolia Bakery.


After pizza and a cupcake, we were off to the airport. Tim's flight from Boston landed as we were on the Airtrain so we all met at the Air China counter right around the same time. Our flight ended up being delayed. Which was no big deal the first two times. When they delayed it the third time they were nice enough to let us know why. There was a monkey loose on the plane. You read that right, a monkey was running around the plane and they couldn't catch it. Crazy! We never really got much addition detail to the story and we never saw a monkey or the affects of a monkey but I appreciate them telling us why we weren't leaving on time even if it meant they made up a ridiculous story of a monkey gone wild. While we were waiting, we met Dave and Gina. They saw our "Affordable Asia" luggage tags and introduced themselves. They are going on the same tour and they were start enough to call Affordable Asia and let them know we were delayed.

After a four hour delay, we were finally on the plane. And just as I was dosing off to sleep I hear the Captain notify us that we now have a weather delay. So we hung out on the tarmac for another hour. But finally, at 9:45pm, 5 hours behind schedule, we were in the air!
Thankfully we had a direct flight from JFK to Beijing. It was over 13 hours on the plane but it really wasn't bad. I spent a lot of it sleeping.

When we finally landed in Beijing, I was a little nervous but was more excited than anything. I ran around like a typical American tourist taking pictures of everything and nothing...

It wasn't too different to get through all of the obstacles to get through customs. We did have to go through an area that took your body temperature. It was pretty crazy and uneventful in the end. After all the hoops, we finally made it to baggage claim and all of our bags made it!

As soon as we made it into the common area of the airport, we were easily able to spot the Affordable Asia flag. Leo was there to take us from the airport to our hotel. It took us able an hour to get there but during that time, Leo helped us with counting and learning the sign for all of the numbers. It was dark outside so there really wasn't anything to look at. It didn't really feel like we were in a different country.

We pulled up to our hotel and the first thing we saw was the 24 hour McDonalds that was across the street. Seriously! But we got our bags and our hotel keys and we all headed to bed. We weren't really tired since we slept so much on the plane but it didn't matter, we had a wake up call in 5 hours so we had to try and get some more sleep. By the time we got up to our rooms and in bed it was 1:30am, Saturday, May 26th. Yeah, we had lost an entire day. Between the 13 hour flight and the 12 hour time difference we missed Friday. But we couldn't think about that, we had too much to see and do to focus on.

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