Back home, safe and sound

Wow… what a trip back home.  On the road for 33 hours give or take.  That was one long-ass trip.  We started the trip at 6am China time, and driving to the airport was weird, lots of random “oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-I’m-leaving” thoughts.  Also, a very odd (for America thing I noticed.  The median of the highway had shrubbery planted.  And I don’t mean big-ass shrubbery, I mean an endless row of pairs of small shrubbery, all relatively neatly trimmed.  First of all, there is no way on god’s earth you’d ever see that in the states, because the man power needed to plan two small bushes side-by-side, then move two feet to the right, repeat, move two feet to the right, repeate… for miles on end… it would never happen.  And then to have them trimmed?  Ridiculous.  But I guess that’s what you get when you have a population of 1.3 billion.  Lots of cheap manpower.

So minor crisis at the first airport… the domestic flight to Beijing had an overall weight limit of 20 kilos…. and my luggage weighed in combined at 50… and they only allowed us to pay the overage in yuan… and there was no bank where I could pull money using my American debit card.  Thank god the girls school where we had done our Saturday teaching had decided to pay us for our time… Jeff (the teacher I was traveling with) and I had enough extra money on us to cover the charges.  If they hadn’t paid us, it would have been a big big mess.

Trip to Beijing went smoothly… but their were some major rain-storms in Beijing that held us up there for a couple of hours.  Once the plane took off for Chicago, everything was fine, I managed to quasi-sleep/doze for 8 or 9 hours out of the 13 hour flight, which was great… but we missed our connecting flight in Chicago because of the delays.  So… we spent an extra hour and half in Chicago waiting for the next flight to NY… which means we didn’t hit NYC until midnight.  Jeff lives in NYC, so that wasn’t so bad for him, but I still had to get back to Philly.  Fortunately, my friend Marisa was still able to pick me up at the later hour, and we made it back to Philly around 2:30am.  Thanks Mis!  You’re the best!  Taking the train home at that hour would have SUCKED.

So anyway… home at 2:30am Monday night/Tuesday morning… didn’t get to bed until 5am… unpacking a little bit… checking e-mail… I was kinda wired.  Slept right through until 7pm on Tuesday… woke up for 3 hours… grabbed some dinner on the Oregon Street diner (which by the way, at $10 was equivalent to 80 yuan… frickin’ expensive! at least in terms of China)… then back to sleep at 10:30pm… and up again at 2:30am this morning.  All in all, actually not so bad… I’m feeling pretty rested at this point, and made good use of the time early this morning un-packing and doing some laundry.  Going to try and get into work early so I can hopefully leave a little early and take care of a some of the errands that I had lined up for yesterday (Tuesday), which of course I slept through entirely.

Now that I’m not sleep-deprived, I should have some time tonight to get photos up.  I will keep everyone posted.  I’m planning on keeping the blog going for now for anyone interested in continuing to read, we’ll see if I have enough interesting things to say about life in Philly to make it worthwhile.  Laterz y’all.