Connecting Mandarin and English,
          Chinese and American,
                    people with people

The Shortest Day
(August 26, 2008) (return to Homepage)
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     Okay, this is a day we lost. We awake about 7:00AM PDT in a hotel way over our heads. It was curesty of Air Canada who couldn't an airplane to replace the one with the bird stuck in the engine, that was originally ours. They also gave us a $9.52 breakfast voucher for a restaurant where the basic egg and bacon started at $19.99 Canadian dollars.We had oatmeal.
     Slowly our newfound family of "bumped" traveler returned to the terminal for another several hours of waiting together. By now we knew the children and their parents, the lady who will teach English in China for a third year because she was tired of teaching in Japan, the French girl and her German companion, and many more who exchanged a short story and a couple one-liners. We boarded on time and headed west.
     And then we lost the day. I set my watch and it was 2:00AM in China -- Wednesday. The children are doing fine considering we're on a twelve-hour flight. The two meals (so far) were grand; sleeping comes randomly; and only the movie channel is working. There is electricity for the computer but no Internet connection, probably until we land.
     It's four more hours, until we land, and all's well.