Today I mostly freaked out. Not all at once, but every time I tried to gather my things and pack. So much to do! I didn't finish until midnight, which is just as well because I hadn't planned on sleeping that night anyway. For dinner, John took me out to Ukai Japanese Steakhouse on Grand River¡very good, and entertaining. I'd never been to a steakhouse so it was cool to see them cook right in front of us. Everything was wonderful, thanks John! I kept packing up until midnight, when John picked me up and we got some wine and strawberries and a bunch of movies. We needed to leave for Owen Hall, where the rest of my study abroad group was meeting before going to the airport, by 6:00 am, and since the flight was a minimum of 20 hours long, I hadn¡¯t been sleeping much on purpose so I could sleep on the plane the whole time. I almost met my goal¡ I fell asleep for only one hour. I ended up sleeping a total of 7 hours in three days, not too bad. We watched Love, Actually and part of Paycheck before leaving. We arrived at Owen around 10 of¡and no one else was there. Kinda weird, seeing how our plane left at 9:11, not leaving us much time. The bus taking us to the airport was there, but there was no sign of my teacher or other students. It turns out that Prof. Yin's card had been turned down, too, and we had to spend an extra half hour waiting while everything was figured out. After everyone came, luggage in hand, we realized there wasn't enough room on the bus for everyone. I was the lucky person who had to ride in the leading car with some guy and a bunch of luggage, very awkward I must say. He was nice, but anyone who wears and business suit at six in the morning only to drive 13 people to the airport immediately raises suspicions with me. I pretended to sleep the whole time.
Check in at the airport took forever, as always, and we pretty much had to run to get to our plane. No one was left in the waiting area when we dashed over, and Prof. Yin ended up being the very last person on the plane.
This part of the trip was pretty short, a five hour flight to San Francisco. I sat next to a nice couple that had been to pretty much every country ever and loved talking about it. They were very sweet, up until the end when the husband opened up the overhead compartment and a computer fell HARD on the back of a girl¡¯s head sitting behind us. Oops. The ride was gorgeous, barely any cloud cover so we could see the ground the whole time. I've never been out west, and it was amazing to see the earth change. Going over the Rockies was awesome. We stayed in SF for about two hours, then came the LONG ride¡ 11 hours to Tokyo. It went by pretty quick all in all, I slept most of the time and watched bits of movies. The food wasn't great, but every hour or so they'd try to give us something else. ¡°Pretzels? Ice cream? Soda?¡± I've never eaten so much on an airplane. Our layover in Tokyo wasn't bad and we landed in Beijing around 9:30 pm, exactly a 12 hour different from home and a day later. We completely missed Saturday, which threw everyone off for quite some time. All in all, I'd been traveling from six am till 9:30 pm the next day.
A bus picked up us and took us to the hotel, a small place called Bielin with no elevator. Dragging my luggage up three flights of stairs reminded me of Prague when the elevator broke and we lived on the sixth floor. Fun stuff.
We all wanted to go outside and explore a bit, and by the time we were reading and unpacked they had already locked the hotel. Apparently there is a curfew. That should make partying somewhat difficult. And this ends day one.
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