The Travel Home

Today we left China. The leaving process was spectacular, I must say.

We all returned to the hotel after the two-show day and were told that any suitcases we were intending to leave with the company during the layoff we had to bring to the lobby by 11pm. We got back around 1050pm. I had pretty much done my packing, but as we were on the bus back to the hotel, I decided to go ahead and try to leave some things, basic things, behind in my broken suitcase. Then, if something happened, I left behind a broken suitcase and items I would never need again (I hope).

So I ran upstairs and completely repacked my three suitcases within 15 minutes.

I brought my suitcase down and then came back up. Unfortunately, I had managed to lock myself out of the room, because I’m that good, so I had to go back down to get a new key. I did some more packing so that the room wouldn’t be a complete mess, especially in case Vivian decided to sleep. So I did some repacking, then headed down to the hotel bar for our goodbye soiree.

As I left my hotel room, who was running at me but STALKER BOY! I had managed to avoid him all week, and somehow, he knew it was our last night, and came to say goodbye. I didn’t want to bring him to the bar, but there was no way I was going to stay with him in the hallway, especially near my room. So I let him follow me to the bar.

Of course, I walk into the bar and the girls are there, and everyone turns and sees me walk in with him. The eyes lit up, Viv couldn’t hold back her laughter. But she played it off well. I guess we made it awkward enough because suddenly he said he had to go to bed.

(I’m listening to a song from Love Actually- my favorite movie being played in the plane).

However, the bar wasn’t going to be able to offer us much, so we moved on to the Japanese restaurant in the hotel. I do wish I’d gone earlier. The only options for me on the menu were edamame and cucumber roll, but I got the cucumber roll this evening and it was delish! And cheap, only 12Y (less than $2). Eventually, nearly the entire cast ended up in the restaurant, and I’m not sure the wait staff was expecting it, especially since we were there until about 2am, maybe later, I can’t remember. Many people had decided to pull all-nighters by then, so sleep wasn’t in the cards for most of us.

I ended up not really sleeping. I think I got about 45 minutes of cat nap in there, but didn’t actually sleep.

Morning came, Vivian left around 450am for her 5am bus, so I hung in the room for a while. I went to the gym to run, get my legs moving (I end up with fairly major restless leg syndrome on planes, even short flights), and finished packing.

I brought my stuff downstairs, and joined the others on the late bus to the airport.

We arrived, and split our ways to our flights, though most of us at this point were taking the same flight from Wuhan to Shanghai, and most were continuing to Atlanta. I think there were only about 12 of us, but I’m not sure.

I began to get really nervous about the weight of my suitcases. But I kept them packed as planned for the short flight. We did have overage fees for weight, so we are waiting to hear from Radar about what we owe. See, are allowed the standard 50lbs, but when the standard weight changes, they will cover the cost up to 50lbs. So in this case, the weight limit was 40lbs, so they will cover the cost of the 10lbs. However, most of us were even over 50lbs, which we think is BS. I was expecting one of my suitcases to be overweight, but they do it differently in China. It’s based on the combined weight, and you get charged by how much weight you are over, not in intervals like they do here in the US. So I remember I was about 12 kg overweight, but I don’t know how that translates into pounds.

The Wuhan flight was quick and easy. They gave us lunch, with the option of chicken or something else, Tiffan (whom I was sitting next to) and I asked for chicken. I’m not sure what we got, but there’s no way it was chicken.

We eventually found our way to the check-in at the Shanghai airport. The lines were ridiculously long, we must have stood in the check-in line for over an hour. Our bags again were overweight, as expected, but we were flying delta and were allowed the standard 50lbs. The Chinese lady helping us was very nice, and gave us the chance to move stuff around. I took out all of my fragile items and put them in my new panda bag. And out of the other suitcase, I took out my garment bag, and doing those two things made the suitcases weigh less, but now I was carrying around my heavy backpack with my electronics, my heavy purse with the odds and ends, the heavy garment bag, and the heavy fragile items. My entire body hurts right now.

Then we stood forever in line to get on the delta plane and we took off late. Not too late, but late still, because the security measures were just ridiculous. We must have gone through bag inspection no less than 3 times.

We boarded the plane, and saw it was NICE. We each had our own tv screens, and you could pick movies or tv shows or music or games or news… whatever!

So I watched some movies:
August Rush
Juno
I Am Legend

And tried to watch a few others.

I also watched a very old episode of “The Office” and an episode of “House.” I also listened to Carrie Underwood’s cd “Carnival”.

We were served really decent food too. It was pretty fancy!

But once we had to get off the plane in Atlanta, and go through customs, that was terribly long.

So I hung with Amy (lead trumpet player) as we navigated through all of the steps of this process. If I remember correctly, we had to go through customs first. This proved to be easy, it was just a long line. We just had to declare everything, but they certainly didn’t check a thing.

Finally, we got to baggage claim, where Terry was waiting for me. My suitcases came in, and my broken suitcase came in even more broken than I’d sent them, but we made it home ok.