Hello my friends at Canucks!
I fear I will never be able to express my joy and sense of wonder at finally being in the China that I have loved so long from afar. I suppose I feel like the
adolescent boy who has admired the prettiest girl in the class for months, and she finally gave me a wink! Now all I can do is stammer...
So I will just tell you about the trip as a story. James, my son, and I flew out of the Dallas/Fort Worth Texas airport on a Korean Airline 777 on Saturday. It was a very long flight, but the service on the plane was wonderful and the Korean food very tasty. The female flight attendants were so cute in their pretty
Korean uniforms! When we landed at the Inchon airport we had a five hour layover and spent a great deal of our time marveling at (and photographing) the trendy
young couples who find it fashionable to dress identically and stroll around the airport looking so hip.
We finally got on our China Southern flight to Dalian after a couple of delays and took off into the night. By this time we were both pretty tired, but we filled out the paperwork and prepared to land in Dalian! Unfortunately Dalian wasn'
t prepared for us. High winds finally caused the pilot to divert the plane to Tianjin, where we waited for hours to get off the plane and go through customs and immigration. The airline put us up in a fair hotel and we finally got to sleep in a real bed for a few hours. Of course, my poor, dear friend Dove was waiting at the airport for a plane that never arrived and probably didn't get to sleep any earlier than I did. I felt terrible that I had no way to contact her at the hotel and I didn't have a cell phone to call her.
There was no contact from the airline to tell us when we would fly out to Dalian
, so I set the alarm for 6:30 and got up for a nice buffet breakfast and when I
asked the desk manager when we would be taken back to the airport he said, "There is your bus. Waiting for you." I rushed upstairs and James and I quickly packed and hopped on the bus. We made it through security easily and had some tea at the airport while we waited through a couple more delays. Finally we got on the plane and were informed that takeoff was delayed while the were "waiting for
documents." After an hour or so, we took off and marveled at all of the fish ponds and the lovely city of Dalian and the not-so-lovely brown cloud of air pollution covering the bustling metropolis. Finally landing, I put on my cowboy hat
(so that Dove would recognize me) and marched to the baggage claim. And there she was, waving with the sweetest smile. I walked over to her, but we were kept
apart by security, so I gave her my best traditional Chinese bow, much to the amusement of the uniformed guard. To be continued....
