Traveling Adventures

Over the years I’ve had my fair share of travelling misadventures especially when it comes to air travel. We started out the day pretty alright in London, it was a lovely day, we packed up our stuff went and got some last minute presents for friends and family and were well on our way to China: our next leg of the trip. We even got to have a great Indian meal in London before heading to the airport.

I suppose the scheduled tube closures somewhat set the tone of the next 20 so hours of travel. Taking detours was simple enough although more time consuming than I would have liked. Next we boarded the plane, and headed towards our new destination: Beijing. The time difference and fighting for the armrest with my neighbour made sleeping rather difficult, but the movies kept me entertained ( I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised at how funny the Pink Panther 2 was; I did not enjoy pink panther 1!).

We landed in Beijing in pretty good time despite a late start due to runway conflicts. Taking my dads advice we proceeded to go find ourselves some tickets to Guangzhou. Unfortunately, unlike what my dad had promised I’d find, there were no discount tickets available ( it was rather expensive, 3500¥ for Brit and myself) nor was there a place to find/purchase SIM cards. No worries I thought, I got money on us and pay phones shouldn’t be hard to find. Both of the above statements are true, unfortunately to use the pay phones in the airport you need to first purchase a phone card. Cheapest one: 50¥. After asking to pay people to use their cellphones and getting rejected I was getting dejected. So after some fustrating moments Brit convinced me to pay the crazy overpriced 50¥ to call the GZ family. So I went to the machine to purchase the calling card only to be told it was broken! At this point, I was definitely getting pissed off. Is there really no way for people to call without a cellphone? And no way to purchase one either? (Brit notes: collect calls and using our caliing card from London also did not work) Luckily after some more tries some guy was nice enough to lend us a phone. So I proceeded to call the number my dad gave us, first number: no answer; second number: doesn’t exist. Damn, this is not working at all! Luckily I had my aunts number and it worked, alright! Our arrival time: 5pm. Only 7 hours after we landed in Beijing, not ideal but at least we can still make it back in time for afternoon dim sum and then catch up on some serious Zzzs.

As we are waiting we noticed that we were to have a delay in boarding, then a delay in taking off. And 15 minutes before we were supposed to land an announcement came on: “Due to poor weather conditions we are unable to land the plane. We will now divert the plane to Shen Zhen.” Gah! We ended up staying in Shen Zhen for 3 hours sitting in the plane waiting for clearance to go back to our original destination. A lot of people complained of hunger seeing as we left at 2 and did not get any food on the plane, in fact there were no food on the plane at all. The guy sitting behind us complained very loudly, we gave him some pita and he turned it down asking us for cookies! How rude! If he was so hungry he should be grateful for whatever is offered to him!

Anyway here is the story of our entrance in china. Hopefully things will smoother in Guangzhou.

Tags: delays
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