Hello to everybody in Lotus Land and beyond. I have finally arrived in China. My email isn't up and running yet, but I was able to send this note out to you all.

Let me tell you about my plane trip. What's a good travelling story without mentioning about the plane.

We left Cal Poly Pomona at about 9am or so and got to LAX about an hour or so later. Our flight was a China Eastern flight from LAX to Beijing via Shanghai. The plane was about 1 hour late in taking off. But at least we got off the ground.

On the plane before we hand taken off, the stewardess announced that we would be making an unplanned stop in Anchorage, Alaska due to bad weather. They didn't say where the bad weather was.

Once we took off, the TV screens had a map display of the local area, the regional, and the international area. I had never been on a flight where the TVs were on most of the time. On the flights I've been on, the only time they use the TVs is to show the movies and info about the destination. Anyway, there were not only maps, but also flight info like air speed, outside temperature, altitude, time at origin, time at destination, estimated time until arrival. It was all very interesting.

There were also more movies than I expected. I think there must have been at least 4 movies. The first was called "Be There or Be Square," a Chinese film. The second one was a German film dubbed into English called "Miss Diamond." The third was called "Love in the Internet Generation." It was also a Chinese film. The last one, and the big daddy of them all, was "The Count of Monte Cristo." It was actually dubbed into Mandarin with English subtitles. Interesting, eh? Imagine Gerard Depardieu speaking Mandarin.

As usual, I had trouble sleeping on the plane. I think I must have gotten only an hour worth of sleep on the flight. That's okay, though, because I was already trying to adjust to China Standard time (China ST). The flight must have been around 16-17 hours long. Most of time I just ended up sitting in my seat trying to keep myself occupied with sleep or the TV. I walked up now and then and talked to some of the other teachers.

Anyway, enough of the gory details. We landed in Beijing around 10:30-11pm China ST. Our waibans, or Foreign Affairs Officers, met us at the airport and gave us a warm greeting. We all wanted to quickly get to the hotel and sleep. We had a big day ahead of us...