Welcome to China very much!
We bought our tickets to China!! Woohoo! We depart for our grand adventure on Tuesday, April 1.... just under 7 months from now.
We're flying with Korean Air. I haven't flown with them before. but our friend Novi was on a Korean Air flight recently and said it was really nice... the planes have recently been upgraded and the flight attendants got a whole new outfit. Because ... I like my flight attendants lookin' pretty. Especially when I have to look at them for 18+ hours. (Just kidding. About the pretty, not the 18 hours.) Although if I remember correctly from my previous flights... it wasn't so bad. For some reason, my trips to Europe have all seemed much longer than the 2 round-trip flights I've had to Asia. Okay, well coming back from India that last time took a crazy long time, but that's because the flight left 16 hours late thanks to fog I missed all my connections and slept in the Indian Airport the first night and spent another night in Singapore before finally getting back to the U.S.
But as far as the actual flying time, the Asia flights were way better. Perhaps I just had it in my head that I was going to be stuck on the plane foreverrrrrrrrrrr. I don't know. Or maybe the flights didn't seem as bad because the flight attendants were prettier. I bet that's it.
When I told my mom we got our tickets last night, she asked me about our "other reservations." At first I was like, "What other reservations?" and then I realized she meant our hotels and in-country travel. So then I had to explain to her what independent travel in Asia is like, especially budget independent travel. You can't even book train tickets anywhere in China until 10 days in advance. Plus, we don't want to be on a schedule. If we don't make it to all of the places on our wish list, so be it. We're going back to China anyhow. We just want to enjoy this trip and soak up what the places we do visit have to offer. If we have the money, maybe we splurge on an actual hotel for one or two nights, but for the most part we're staying in hostels. Or we might meet people on the train or in a village and get invited to stay with them. Man, if I had the names and addresses of everyone who invited me into their homes the last time I was in China, we wouldn't need to spend a single night in hostel! Except when we wanted some privacy. Because privacy is one thing that doesn't come easy over there.
So, China, here we come! There's no turning back now! Yeehaw!
(Thanks to http://chinglish.de for the photo!)