Home again

I’m home again, and enjoying the warm weather here in Brisbane.I had a bit of a freakout at Beijing Capital International Airport yesterday – when I got there to checkin (once I’d managed to find the checkin desk!) there were 60 or 70 people waiting in front of me. The 4:20pm flight to Hong Kong had been delayed by nearly an hour, and there were flyers on the checkin desk advising that due to serious airspace congestion at PEK, flights could be stacked up and ready to take off but have to wait for more than an hour.This wasn’t acceptable, so I asked the checkin staff whether I could get standby on the KA909 that was going at 1710 so I would not miss the connection with QF98 out of Hong Kong. Luckily for me I was able to get standby, but that wasn’t immediately clear. Hot-footing it over to the standby registration desk I was greeted with the announcement that KA909 was full, with no further standby requests accepted. Back to checkin. Aaargh! J called me right then wondering whether I had just forgotten to call her and she was a bit concerned about me missing QF98 too. The checkin staff then reassured me that there definitely was a seat for me, and to go direct to the other desk and push forward. I’m not used to the pushing forward thing in queues, but I was starting to get frantic – it was less than 30mins before departure! Standby gave me my boarding pass, collected my luggage and then I dashed through immigration and security literally sprinting up the other end of the terminal to just get on board KA909 a minute or two before the doors closed.Most definitely NOT my idea of a fun way to do international travel!Got to HK alright, found the transfer desk and was incredibly relieved to find out that BCIA had managed to check my suitcase through to Brisbane. As it turns out I had nearly an hour before scheduled boarding of QF98 so I grabbed a decent-sized bite to eat, then once more had to make my way to the other end of the terminal to board.The flight from HK departed on time, I had a window seat, the food was ok (better than the alleged noodles + pork on KA909) and I managed to get a few hours sleep thanks to my sleep deficit, exhaustion from talking to people for 8 hours straight at the Beijing Sun Tech Day and these a href=”http://www.sennheiser.com/sennheiser/icm.nsf/root/500370″>little beauties