I made it...

There is a certain inconvenient/serendipitous quality that one could ascribe to me when it comes to airports and making connections in the midst of travel.

At PDX over a year ago I missed the shuttle back to my college campus and had to pay $40 to get another shuttle to drive me to school. Inconvenient no doubt, but serendipitously I had a really great driver named John with whom I conversed the whole way back.

I mention this because on the way to Shanghai I had a similar misadventure when I missed my connecting flight to Vancouver in Seattle, but ended up in the front row of the next airline, where I got to talk to a very nice flight attendant named Stephanie.
True my luggage didn't get on the flight to Shanghai and I had to buy a new T-shirt and underwear my first day in Wenzhou, but I choose to place a higher value on the inflight conversation than on the absence of my extra clothes.


Admittedly I did learn one valuable lesson from this event: always pack an extra pair of underwear in your carry-on, no matter how much you trust the crew.


The flight over the Pacific was surprisingly pleasant. I sat next to a young African-Canadian woman from Ontario named Aya who was going to medical school in Hubei. She's a returning sophomore in a five year program of combined Traditional and Western Medicine. I think she's Moslem because she wore a black hood that covered her head and neck.
On my little TV I watched "10,000 BC" (weak plot no doubt, but I was having trouble writing lesson plans and needed a distraction) and listened to the radio. I found a really catchy Jamaican song called "Take you there", and listened to "Bleeding Love" (my brothers' most-listened-to-song of the summer), so it was a nice way to depart the continent.

For my one-night layover in Shanghai I was instructed to sleep for a few hours in the afternoon if I was tired, get up for a few hours to eat dinner, then sleep for the rest of the night to avoid any jet-lag. I went to bed around 17:30 local time and slept the rest of the night. I woke up several times, but stayed in bed with my eyes closed until around 7:00 in the morning.
Not quite as I was instructed, but it worked.

My teacher-now-colleague Julie and her husband picked me up at Wenzhou Airport that morning (8/23/08 locally) and after my bags still failed to show up they took me to my apartment, then shopping to get some slippers, a T-shirt, underwear (which was embarrassing) and some plates and bowls.

We had lunch in a small restaurant in Chashan (the University town) and dinner at a restaurant in downtown Wenzhou that does a lot of Northeast-style food (where Julie is from).

It's hot and muggy, I don't know when I start teaching, what I'm supposed to be teaching is still a somewhat elusive concept, I'm dehydrated, I hardly understand anything that others are saying, and to top it all off, my bags are still missing...

...life is good.