Home at last!

Well, I made it home safe and sound anyway. What a trip back! My last day was fairly hectic, I went down to Dazhalan hutong to do a final bit of shopping and then went out for lunch with Dermot, one of the Irish guys. "Lunch" turned into drinks down in Huahai, and I only got back to my apartment at about 6pm, with still all of my stuff to pack, and no tine for one last trip down to the Silk Market. Got everything squared away eventually, nad went straight out to a bar in the Kerry Center to met Mina, the english chick I'd met at the Paddy's day ball. The bar was a fairly swanky place - low lighting, minimalist dcor, liv jazz band in the cornr, full of people in suits networking like a mad thing (loads of swapping business cards) - and 50 kuai beers! Normally the kind of place I'd avoid like the plague, but Mina is a corporat headhunter so she moves through that sort of environment like a fish through water - seemed to know everyone in the bar. She managed to score me a few free drinks off the bar manager so I'm not complaining! After a while Dermott and Fionn turned up, and seeing as they felt as out of place there as I did, we headed off down to Sanlitun to meet Peter and Sylvia, the Austrians I'd gone skiiing with before. We stayed ther a while, tehn ended up back in my usual haunt, Propaganda. As usual with Propaganda, I ended up getting to bed at 3am.

Three hours later, my alarm went off and I had to get up and get ready to lave for good. Things started off badly enough, as I was supposed to drop the keys of the apartment off with the gate guard who'd hand them into the agency later on. Thing is, no-one had told her, and she didn't speak any english, so it took 25min and the help of a few passers-by to get the point across. So, I got tot he airport a bit later than planned, but still a good bit before the normal check-in time, so I could be first in the queue and get away with the overweight luggage.

Or so the plan went anyway. Thing is, when I got there, I got stuck behind a greoup of fecking belgians who seemed to be trying to book their connecting flights from hathrow to brussles at the check-in counter, and who were all at least 7-8kg overweight with their bags. The check-in girl wasn't the most efficient either - I timed her at 15min to check in a group of 3 ppl! So, despite starting to queue at 7:45 for a 10:20 flight, I only got to the counter at about 9:15 - after having only had 8 ppl in the queue ahead of me! Miracle of miracles, my bags squeaked in under the limit - 22.5Kg. Good job they didn't check the weight of my carry-on bag, which I reckon was another 11kg or so!

I managed to get through customs and security with the minimum of hassle (a lot less than when I was going to Japan actually), and the 11hr flight passed like all 11hr flights do - slowly. Unfortunately we hit headwinds on the way over and arrived 15mins late, which meant we lost our gate slot and had to park on the tarmac at heathrow and get bussed into the terminal. The buses took another 10mins to get to us, so by the time I hit the terminal 4 building I had an hour to get to my gate at Terminal 1. Now, while the shortest distance between any two points is supposed to be a straight line, there is no such thing as the shortest distance betwen two points in Heathrow airport, and I just about got to my gate just as they were calling my row number to board - talk about tight timing!

So, finally after another hour and a half flight I was back on Irish soil at last. Unfortunately, I hit the arrivals hall at 5:20, which put me too late to get to Heuston to catch the 6:25 Waterford train (the airport to heuston station in an hour during rus hour on the friday of a bank holiday? Fuggdaboutit!). So, I hopped on the 6:30 Rapid Express bus instead. The word "rapid" in "Rapid Express" seems to come from the same place as the same word in the DART's name, to go the 120-odd miles from the airport to Waterford, it took 1/3 of the tiem that it took to fly the 9,000-odd mils form Beijing to London! Then again, I suppose the 777 didn't have to stop in every pissant little village along the way either. So, at 10pm I got off the bus at last, and by 10:30 I was home, or 23 1/2 hours after my alarm went off to start me on the journey.