Live from Hangzhou

Yay, internet connection! Yes, we really did finally get to China. We stayed overnight in Detroit, scheduled to leave around 11 the next morning. Of course, once we got into the airport and through security again, we found out the plane had been delayed again until 12:45pm, so we had a few hours to wait there anyway. Oooh, the excitement.

12 and a half hours (meaning 3 movies and half a book) later, we landed in Tokyo. Wierdly, we landed at a remote gate, so we got bussed in from one of the runways on the extreme edge of the airport land, so I got to see an entirely different side of Narita. When our bus got to the terminal, we went through security to get into the main part of the terminal, only to find that we had been rebooked onto a JAL flight to get to China, instead of continuing on Northwest. This meant we needed to be in Terminal 2, so off we went on another bus. After going through 2 more security checkpoints, we got onto the plane to Shanghai with 5 minutes to spare.

At this point, I had been awake for about 26 hours. Luckily, the flight was not very crowded, and we could all spread out and sleep. Amazingly, when we got to Shanghai, our luggage was all there! I do not attribute this miracle to Northwest at all, by the way. I give credit entirely to the Japanese people responsible for rebooking us over to JAL. We picked everything up off the conveyor belt, headed out the "Nothing to Declare" door, and ta-da!, found the people Eva had sent from the college. Also there were Lee's aunt and uncle, with their dog, because the dog loves Lee so much from when he took care of it when they first moved to Shanghai. He was kind of embarrassed, but they also gave him a cell phone and a bunch of food, so I think they were easily forgiven.

We all went to exchange money, and then lugged all the luggage to the van to go to Hangzhou. It was a 2 hour drive, so we arrived at about 1am. We had just enough time to get 5 hours of sleep before we had to be up for the conference and ready to present. But that, I think, will be another story.