We're on the move again

Traveling in china is always an adventure - especially when you can't speak the language and you are Caucasian, both of which happened to apply to us :)

Last Saturday we left zhangjiang headed for chengdu. Just as a reminder, the zhangjiang airport is tiny although it services an area of 7 million people. Go figure! In such a small airport, it became obvious quickly that we were the only western family and immediately drew lots of attention.

One lady came and stood basically right beside us as if she was part of our family. She continued to speak Chinese to us despite our lack response. It was no surprise that she quickly found a seat right next to us in the waiting area. Unlike most airports in the US, most airports in china do not have jetbridges; therefore, one must walk outside or in some cases, ride a bus, to get to the airplane.

During our short wait in the terminal, the bottom fell out of the sky so we had to walk out to the plane in the rain. We were told we could gate check our stroller but once we got to the plane we were told to go back to the terminal to check the stroller. After getting the run around, herbie basically refused and said we would just put the stroller under our seats. Sometimes it pays off to be a "dumb foreigner." There's no such thing as waiting in line to the Chinese. Picture herding animals - that's what it's like when massive amounts of people are trying to get in a small space. Because of the stroller glitch, quite a lot of people had amassed behind us and were getting a bit impatient. Let me just say that when i was getting dressed that morning, i thought to myself, "a long skirt would probably be best for traveling." Little did i know i would be walking through puddles and climbing long,wet staircases to our plane while carrying a baby on my hip, a rolling backpack in my other hand and trying to hold up my nice, long good-for-traveling skirt in my hand too! So now we had lots of people basically pushing us up the stairs trying to get to their seats. We made it to our seats and were greeted with a nice surprise - we had been upgraded to economy comfort seats because of my world traveling husband's diamond medallion status. I was thankful for the extra few inches of room in our seats.

Instead of a direct flight, we had to make a connection in Guangzhou. Again, let me remind you that traveling in china is a little different. Instead of our bags going on through to chengdu, we had to get them at the baggage claim, re-check them and then go back through security. Sounds simple enough, right? Lets just say that our two and a half hour layover went by very quickly.

After a grand tour of the Guangzhou airport, we had worked up a healthy appetite. So we headed to McDonalds - while I don't love feeding my kids chicken nuggets and fries for dinner, trust me, given the options, you would have chosen fries for dinner too.




So what we thought would be a long two and a half hours turned out to end rather abruptly when we realized it was last call for our flight. Keep in mind, no jet bridges. So we hand the guy our tickets and he directs us to board the bus. We walk out to the bus to find it spilling over with people. Realizing there is no way for us to squeeze on we go back to the terminal to let then know there is no room in the inn. The guy walks us back out there, points to the bus, and basically says, "what's the problem?" Through hand motions we explain that there are 5 of us, plus our carry on bags and that we won't fit on the bus that is spilling over with people. It would have made too much sense to get another bus for us plus the other 10 passengers that showed up after us, so instead, he pulled one large bag off the bus and had all 5 of us stand in its place. Makes total sense, right? So needless to say we were packed in there like sardines. Let's just say the ride out to the plane wasn't the smoothest. Grateful to have made it without falling over, we boarded our plane to chengdu.


Adelynn and I sat together right behind a precious little Chinese girl who entertained us most of the trip - she sang several songs to us including twinkle twinkle little star and old McDonald had a farm. We were quite impressed with her English. Thanks to google translate we were able to tell her mother that she was very beautiful and very smart.

We were greeted at the airport by some friends who live in chengdu. After a long day of traveling we were thankful to get settled into our apartment that we would call home for the next few days.

Sorry we are a little behind on our posts - things are extremely busy here! I also apologize if all the details are boring; however, we want to remember as many details about our trip as possible so that is why we are including them.

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