In Beijing!

After a very long journey, I made it to Beijing. I left Durban at 3:00pm, to catch a 6:40pm flight. Check in and security were painless enough, except for when a woman at security tried to confiscate my (empty) World Cup water bottle. I kindly reminded her that the rule was for 100ml of liquid, and not for a container. I was disappointed to find that there was no food at all past security. I don't quite understand why some airports have all the food before security; that layout doesn't seem to make sense if airports encourage going through security with lots of time to spare, especially for international flights.

The flight wasn't very full, so I was lucky enough to have an empty seat next to me. The dinner was served within the first hour - it was decent - and then I slept for most of the way. I arrived at Dubai at 5:20am, and my flight to Beijing was set to take off at 10am. Before reaching the physical terminal, I had a little bit of  rough time. We had to walk off the plane and to shuttle busses that would take us to the terminal. Though I was only outside for a minute, the combination of the extreme heat (99 degrees Fahrenheit) and my apparel (sweatshirt and jeans) caused me to feel very ill. On the bus I got very clammy and became dizzy. The discomfort culminated in my fainting on the bus. It was nothing dramatic, and a passenger I had talked to for a little bit at the beginning of the flight helped me up. I drank lots of water after that. 

The Dubai airport was impressively crowded for such an early hour. Every store was open. and the lines for food were incredibly long. Overwhelmed with it all, I walked from one end of the terminal to the other twice, before finally settling on a place to have breakfast. There were hardly any seats available, but I managed to snag a table. A little later, a woman asked if she could join me at my table. We struck up a little conversation: originally from Cape Town, she was flying from New Zealand back to South Africa to visit family. She also told me that she had take a shower at the terminal's health spa for $14. At that point, extremely sweaty, sticky and unhappy, I decided to find the hotel shower. There are public shower stalls in the terminal, but they aren't very private and I didn't have my own towel. Finding the hotel was easy enough, as it was one escalator ride above the level where the departure gates were located. From the glass hallways of the hotel, one looks down on to all of the duty free shoppers and travelers waiting for their flights.

The shower was an incredibly good idea, and I felt extremely refreshed (bodily and mentally) afterwards. I still had just over two hours to kill before boarding. I perused the duty free, but after realizing how tired I was, fell asleep at my departure gate. This flight was much more crowded, and, though I had the same seat that I had on the previous flight, I had a neighbor this time. I slept for the first little bit, then watched two movies: the new Alice in Wonderland and Remember Me. The latter was extremely heartbreaking and I began to cry so much that a flight attendant came to check on me. I was pretty embarrassed, but once I told her what movie I was watching, she understood completely.

I landed in Beijing right around 11:00pm. The waits for passport control and baggage claim weren't horrendous and I was ready to go fairly quickly. My original plan was to meet with another UChicago student (graduate now, technically) who was coming in at the same time as me, and we would head to our hotel (where we're staying for one night, before heading to the conventional center where our Model UN conference and training will be held) together. His flight landed at Terminal 2, and I was informed that that was 40 minutes away from Terminal 3, where I was. We decided it made most sense to get to the hotel on our own. Luckily, I had printed out a piece of paper with Chinese writing that I was told explained directions to the hotel. Relieved, the taxi did indeed pull up to the hotel twenty minutes after leaving the airport. 

For "dinner" (at 2am), I had an instant soup, "Original Hot and Sour Sweet Potato," after refusing to eat anything from KFC, which is were the two other UChicagoers settled on, after snubbing the other few options that were still open at the time. I don't have definitive plans for tomorrow, and we're not exactly sure how or when we are supposed to be at the convention center, so I'm hoping to meet up with Gideon, who has been spending all summer in Beijing and will remain here for the Fall, who could show me around the city. I'm very excited for the Model UN conference and the tourism days they're purportedly organizing for us, but it seems as though we won't get much time to explore the city of Beijing, so I'm hoping to be able to see some of it tomorrow!