A Hitch in Our Getalong

It seems that my last entry was not in fact our last entry from China. We had a bit of a hitch in that we lost the paper tickets for Julie, Dada, and myself somewhere between Guangzhou airport and Beijing airport, which meant that we all missed the flight from Beijing to San Franciso.

We are now back in the Sino-Swiss hotel. We will fly out tommorrow (the 26th). Bill and Judy will be on the same schedule they were on, as they had not lost their tickets we could just move them a day for a small change fee. However, for me, Julie, and Dada, we would have had to buy full-fare tickets to be on that same flight, but we could get seriously discounted seats on a later flight that makes a stop in Shanghai (no plane change). Peggy elected to come with us on that flight (thank you!).

Because our new flight gets in to San Fran later, we couldn't get a direct flight to Austin, so we are staying the night in the Bay Area with our family friends George and Nancy and will fly to Austin on Sunday. That will make the travel ordeal a little easier but gets us back to Austin two days later than planned. Oh well.

At least I was able to get hold of our guide David who had himself just arrived in Beijing. He was able to arrange for us to get to the hotel and booked our rooms and whatnot.

I've had a bit of a trying evening getting the domestic flight arrangements reworked and we still have to do Bill's, as Alaska Airlines doesn't provide 24 hour service, so we have to stay up until they open, which will be in a couple of hours from now (it's 9:20 p.m. on the 25th as I write).

Otherwise everyone is fine. Dada did ok flying--she spent most of the trip on Judy's lap and she only really cried during the descent, when I think her little ears hurt. She spent the afternoon here in the hotel playing and now she's sleeping soundly. We are all pretty tired from having had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to leave the White Swan this morning.

In other news, I failed to post this picture of Bill from a couple of days ago:


Bill with octopus

At the lunch we had in the Cantonese restaurant in the hotel, we had ordered "drunken cuttlefish", which were actually small octopuses (count the legs) in some sort of sweetish sauce. It used a flavoring I'm not that familiar with and I didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoy other ways of cooking squid and octopus (such as the way they do it in Barcelona, with butter and garlic), but it was tasty enough and we all ate some, even Peggy.

So tommorrow we are back to the airport about 11:00 a.m., so it will be a more normal schedule than today, allowing us to start the day well fed and rested instead of tired, hungry, and grouchy.

Here's hoping things go a big more smoothly tommorrow....