A Very Long Day

This blog entry is scheduled to post at 12:01 AM Texas time, which would be one minute past noon in all of China. – They have only one time zone. On the east side you wake up in full daylight, but on the west side it is still night when you get up. – If Jiajing’s mom and I are on schedule we should be approaching Shanghai airport on our flight from Wuhan.

Upon arrival, we will hopefully gather up the luggage we started with, obtain our boarding passes, check through security and customs, and go to our waiting area. We should have lunch on the flight in from Wuhan. Since I fly gold status, we will be able to board just after business class; sometimes earlier.

It is a strange flight from Shanghai to Chicago. We eat three times, watch three to five movies, read and even sleep some and do it in thirty minutes. On a quicker flight, we have even landed before we took off. As we fly from China we are flying toward the next sunrise, but it will be the sunrise of the day we already saw the sunrise for. We will cross the International Date Line and when we do time goes back one day. Since we are flying against the sun, passing over time zones, we will soon be back to the time when we left Shanghai. If this flight had a good tail wind we would have landed before reaching departure time. On this trip they are indicating we will land thirty minutes after departure time.

In Chicago I pray that Jiajing’s mom has no problem clearing customs and that we can still account for all of luggage. Coming in from a foreign country requires you pick up your luggage, take it through security and place it on the belt for your next flight. For a person coming in who can’t read English, this step would be very difficult. You also need to take the train to the domestic side of the airport. On one trip I was asked to take a Chinese family with me to the other side and managed to get them there just before their flight left.

If all goes well we will arrive at DFW at nine PM to meet family for the ride home. Considering that we left Wuhan at 11:20 AM on Thursday and arrived at DFW at 9:00 PM the same day doesn’t sound too bad; only nine hours and 40 minutes. What makes the day difficult is trying to watch all those movies, eat all that food, read your book, and sleep some in thirty minutes, because those minutes are really strange and they leave you feeling really weird; like what day is this and why is it so dark when the sun should be shining.