Plane Rides

Total Travel Time (From my house to my Hong Kong hotel): 32 hours

This means 3:00 AM-->11:00 AM the next morning.

With the time change, it is 3:00 AM Utah---> 1:00 AM Hong Kong two mornings later (so August 27–August 29)

Plane rides are a little bit wonderful, a lot awful, and really very much too long. I travelled with six other girls from ILP and got to take four planes. I first went Salt Lake to Denver, then Denver to Seatle, then Seatle to Tokyo, then Tokyo to Hong Kong. Here is a picture of my first plane:

The flight was nice and short, but the plane was freezing. I had a blanket in my carry-on suitcase, but there wasn't room for it in the plane, so they put it underneath and we got it at the end of the flight. At least I got a window seat. I hadn't flown over cities at night before, the lights are rather pretty, and I was very excited to be going to China, so this flight was relatively enjoyable. In Denver we got onto a different plane:

This is when my group hit a rather big problem

Lady: I'm sorry, there isn't room in the plane for your baggage. We will have to check it.

Us: Oh, okay. So, we'll get it at the end of the flight?

Lady: No. You'll get it when you get to Hong Kong.

Us: !!!!

Lady: You can have a few minutes to get what you need out of your bags.

For people who had backpacks, this wasn't a really huge deal, but I had only brought a purse (apparently that was a bad idea), so I left my extra clothes, charge cables, books, paper, and random other things to be shipped to Hong Kong and only took things that I thought I would really need. This still left me with a blanket, a computer, and extra food to carry around in addition to my purse for the next 24 hours or so of flight time. The flight itself, however, was rather pleasant. I managed to sleep, plus the descent into Seattle is gorgeous. The pictures don't near do it justice, but here is one anyway.

In Seattle we bought lunch

Then we waited the rest of our three-hour layover....except for our flight didn't come in three hours. Or four hours. Or five hours. Finally, at about the five-hour mark they announced that the plane had arrived, but it still needed to be cleaned and serviced, so we ended up spending about six hours in that airport--three more than planned. I ended up using some of the time to run, which was good, but not very fun because the space wasn't very big and I mostly ran in circles. I also read on my tablet which has really wonderful battery life, played on my computer which has less-wonderful battery life, and eavesdropped on all the people sitting around us talking in Japanese.

The flight to Tokyo took ten hours. They had individual TVs for us, so we could choose what to watch, and fed us food twice. I watched some TV, but they didn't have many movies I both wanted to watch and hadn't seen yet. I was yet again very grateful for the battery life of my tablet. I didn't sleep. During this flight, we hit the 24 hours since we started travelling, and that is when basically everyone starts feeling terrible.

We missed our connecting flight in Japan because of the delay of the previous flight. We also missed the flight that they had reassigned us to. When we got to Japan, an employee met us and walked us to a third flight, which we boarded immediately (so I don't have a picture of the plane). I don't remember much of this flight, since I was asleep for most of it.

Someone was supposed to meet us in Hong Kong, but we came out of the terminal and no one was there. Luckily we saw another group that was obviously with us, so we hung out with them for 45 minutes or so until we finally found the person who was supposed to meet us. It was all worth it, though, when we drove into Hong Kong. The city is amazing, and it was all lit up because it was night time. Our hotel was really nice too. I'll put pictures in the next post.