At the Tokyo airport. Note the "Melissa" button on Dennis. Everyone asked about it and it was so much fun to say, "Yes, that's my daughter. We are on our way to get her!"
December 4, 2000 through December 5, 2000.
Depart 11:30am, Seattle to Tokyo, Tokyo to Beijing (arriving 9:00pm 12/5). Our
travel agent had taken our credit card number over the phone and told us the
tickets were paid for. After waiting 1/2 hour to get to the check in counter we
found they had a reservation for us, but no payment. Now to a new line. When we
got to this counter, they called our travel agent. After another 20 minutes or
so they decided she must have forgotten to enter the payment info, so we hauled
out the credit cards again, and waited for tickets to be delivered to us. We
were told this would just be 5 or 10 minutes. After 45 minutes, including two
more trips to the counter, the tickets were finally in our hands. Good thing we
had arrived well over two hours early for the flight!
There are special rates available to adopting families that make flying business class only about $300 to $400 more than coach. We had planed for over a year to fly business class. However, with the short notice we had, all those seats had already been sold. We found we could not get business class seats without paying over $3,000 more than coach. So, we crammed our 6-foot-plus frames into coach and endured. NW Airlines 747 coach class was not as bad as we expected. It was a bit roomier than domestic flights I have flown and we had an empty seat by us to spread out to. We also comforted ourselves with the thought that we had paid extra to have a seat for Melissa on the return flight. (Little did we know our travel agent screwed that up too...)
Our main impression of the Tokyo and Beijing airports - very clean and efficient. More so than the US ones I have been in. By the time you walked to the baggage claim area, it was already coming up.
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At the Tokyo airport. Note the "Melissa" button on Dennis. Everyone asked about it and it was so much fun to say, "Yes, that's my daughter. We are on our way to get her!" |
Dec 5
We stayed the night in Beijing at the Taiwan Hotel. We had twin beds, with
sheets that showed hairs and one dead bug. Heat was stuck at about 85 degrees.
My wife and I have not slept apart, even in the same room with separate beds,
since we were married. We were so tired we crammed into one of the hairy beds
and slept the 7 hours until our alarm woke us.