Travel across the Ocean

We left Los Angeles on a non-stop China Southern Airlines flight to Guangzhou. The plane was an hour delayed into its departure, but we weren't bothered because we knew we had about 6 hours in the Guangzhou airport for our layover. Besides that the business class cabin was one of the nicest I've ever seen. Our chairs reclined with the help of three different automatic adjusters to completely flat beds. We were given thick, soft blankets and comfortable pillows. The in-flight entertainment left something to be desired - all Chinese. We slept much of the way. The meal service as unusual. We found the Chinese passengers seemed to be eating the entire flight, while we only got juice when we asked for food. Finally at the very end we were served "American Style" breakfast of eggs, sausage, biscuit and fruit.
On the plane we filled out our customs paperwork. For some reason I was very nervous about going through customs, however, it turned out to be very easy. We handed three different forms to three different uniformed officers and that was it. We weren't even asked a single question. I thought we would get asked something because we chose the "other" option as our reason for visiting.






Craig and I had plenty of time to explore the massive Guangzhou airport. Craig's first stop was a Chinese version of Starbucks for an Iced Mocha (otherwise known as half a bottle of Nestle's syrup with ice and a little espresso). After roaming for awhile we found that we could "pay to rest" in the First Class Lounge in the airport. It was a nice break where we read and relaxed.

[SPECIAL NOTE FOR HUNTER: You would have loved the first class lounge because it reminded me of your favorite part of EPCOT - the drink station. There was a whole cooler full of different Chinese soda. I liked a lemon-lime one that had a funny picture of a cartoon man on it. It made me miss you even more. Although, I don't know how much you would have liked what happened next.]

After we settled into the First Class lounge we got a jolt of bad news. Our flight which was scheduled to depart at 1:45 pm had been delayed until 5:15 pm. At this point we had been traveling for about 38 hours and any more waiting seemed unbearable. So, I set out to find another flight. Finding the flight was easy. Navigating back out of the security check point, find a supervisor, explaining our desire to change flights, getting our luggage back out, changing airlines, paying an excess weight fee at a different counter, going through a second security screening, finally making it to our new gate, noticing after 30 minutes that the gate now had a different flight boarding, finding the new unannounced gate for the flight, flying in a 30 year old plane with an aggressive pilot, realizing there was no van waiting to take us to our hotel, not finding a soul who understood English, getting a taxi with a poor attempt at pronoucing our hotel name and surviving the wide taxi ride to the hotel - that was the hard part.