Travel Day

Early Wednesday morning we got up just after 3am to catch our plane out of Phoenix for the first leg of our trip. Then we arrived in LA and waited 6 hours for the flight to China. Ug. LA is not a fun airport, you can't really walk it, not anything interesting to browse in the way of stores and restuaraunts. It was a boring 6 hours and we were already pretty tired by the time we boarded the plane to China. We couldn't help but notice there was a pack of about 30 school age chinese children with 3 adults to suprvise the whole crowd waiting for the same plane we were. I was expecting a rowdy flight, especially when we boarded we were seated in the same section they were. But they were very good. They all went to sleep on cue and I never heard them til they woke up at the end of the trip. the flight was 14 hours. fourteen long hours. We each had a tv screen in front of us that we could watch movies or play games on and watch the progress of our flight. when we flew for what seemed like an eternity we finally made it to 7 hours into the flight and the guy next to me gave me a high five. Progress! No not Brent, the other guy on the other side of me. We were so close and paked together, I felt like I knew him pretty well by that time. He was a nice 17 year old Chinese American boy flying for a visit to China. He said his dad had 5 siblings in China, obviously before the one child policy came in to effect. He was meeting his uncle in Shanghai. I thought about how rare that was for anyone in China to have an uncle or an aunt, especially in his generation.
  When we finally flew in to Shanghai, there was a storm and we had to circle the airport. Not something you want to hear after enduring a long flight and where counting the minutes for it to be over. Then when we landed, the storm had messed up the landing schedules so we sat on the tarmac for another hour! Agonizing! I had only managed to sleep for maybe 2 hours on the flight, lets just round it up to 3 for good measure and that would make it a total of 6 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours. (we went to bed at midnight the night before we left- thinking 'oh, this will make it easy to sleep on the plane!)
  We went through the airport and got our bags quite easily and then we needed to take a train to the hostel we were staying at. I was nervous about catching a train and getting lost, I was really nervous now because we felt like the walking dead because we were so tired. There was a help desk at the train station, so Brent got behind a customer who was being helped. No less than 6 people one after the other crowded in front of Brent and mobbed the help desk to be helped first. I got the giggle fits in my exhausted state, watching my always polite husband verge on impatience with these people. Don't mess with the sleep deprived! We had no idea how long the train ride would be but we were able to get our tickets and had a map and felt reasonable confident that we could find our way to the hotel. After a half hour on the train and we had already made 4 stops on the train, and our stop was at 22 we realized this was going to take a while. I we managed to find seats on the train, but even still I was having difficulty staying upright. At some point during the train ride, a lot of people got up for the next exit and a woman motioned for me to come with her. I shook my head 'no' and showed her on our map where we were trying to get to. She said "yes yes, this way.  Come!" Brent and I demured and argued a bit and a few people joined her trying to urge us to get off with them. A lady next to Brent spoke English and finally helped out and looked at our map and said "yeah, just stay on, she doesn't know what she's talking about." The other lady kept insisting we needed to get off and was a bit exasperated with us, but we kept smiling and shaking our heads. When the doors opened everyone got off except us and the English speaking lady. Then a guard got on and shoo'ed us of the train. Apparently it was the end of the line and we had to switch to another train. Our English speaking friend was a fake and admitted she didn't speak any Chinese, she was an American too. Ha!

 Anyway, we had to switch trains  few times, the whole trip by train took 2 hours. Found our hostel and crashed onto our very hard Chinese bed and it never felt so good to sleep.