I've arrived.......

Well, I'm finally here. Sitting in my new office in Beijing (I get an office rather than a cubicle! yay!), trying to get my head around my new environment.

The trip was long, waaay long! Up at 7am sat morning, left the house at 8 to check in for my 10:30 flight, got to heathrow at 11:40 to realise that I was there until 16:40. A 5hr stopover! Luckily I'd checked my bag straight though and gotten my LHR-PEK boarding pass in dublin, otherwise I'd have had to lug my bag around for 5hrs. And it was a heavy bag too! Thank god for the new automated check-in in dublin airport, they never really weighed my bag - reckon I was maybe 10Kg overweight! I was thinking I'd have enough time to go into London to have lunch with my cousin, but then I remembered that he was in India, so that knocked that idea on the head. Instead, I managed to find a bar that was showing the Ireland V Italy rugby match and settled in there for the duration.

I noticed a few rather strange things about Heathrow airport. First off, it seems to defy the law of physics that states that "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line". There is no shortest distance between anywhere in heathrow! Second is the rather strange security measure they have around laptops. When I was going through security in dublin, they made me take the laptop out of its case and put it through the x-ray separately. In heathrow, I had to take the laptop out of its case, put it into a clear plastic bag and put it through the x-ray. The purpose of the plastic bag escapes me, if anyone has a clue, please mail me with the answer. The third strange thing I noticed was that in Terminal 4, the international terminal, the only plug adaptors you can get are UK to European plugs. This is despite the fact that Terminal 4 is the terminal where you go to fly pretty much everywhere else but europe!

Anyway, I made it onto the plane (no thanks to being still in the bar watching England V Wales when the boarding all was announced), and thankfully everything went smoothly after that. Landed in Beijing, got picked up by the taxi, and dropped at the flat. My place here is about the same size as my place back in ireland! I have a few small problems with it though: the TV has 50 channels but only one in english, the controls for the heating system are all in chinese so I'm going by trial and error, and I have a key to the apartment but no key for the front door of the building yet, so so far I'm getting in by waiting for someone else and tagging in behind them!

One more thing that is going to be tricky is food. I went to the supermarket yesterday when I got in, and realised that the first few times I go shopping I'm going to need help, 'cos I can't read the labels on anything! Am going to have to go by the pictures on the box, which don't help since a lot of them are cartoon characters. As for cooking instructions, I'm going to have to make it up as I go along....