Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Leaving On A Jet Plane


A long journey from Bluffton to Beijing. We left home on Wednesday morning and flew from Savannah to Atlanta and changed planes to JFK. Upon arrival we spent the night at a tacky Howard Johnson’s and ordered in great Italian food. Next morning we returned to the airport and boarded our flight to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific Airlines. Only 15 hours later we landed and were glad to stretch our legs. We boarded another flight an hour later and five more hours of flying got us to Beijing where it was Friday. There are 21 people in our group and we are travelling with our friends Laura & Michael Marks. We all met our tour guide at the airport and his name is Sun or Harry in English. We were to find out that many Chinese and all our guides take English names to keep things simple. Sun is actually his family or surname. We landed at terminal three which was built to handle the Olympic traffic and is the largest terminal under one roof in the world. We would see many large buildings.

Sun led us outside where we sent our luggage off to the hotel and boarded a luxury bus which drove for 45 minutes to the Capital Hotel, our home for the next three nights. We were so tired that we fell into bed after unpacking and exploring the room which was quite lovely and spacious. Have to say that the beds were very hard and the next day they delivered a feather bed which made it quite comfy. Our room number was 909 and that is a good omen as nine is a very lucky number in China.

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