10

Ok - I am home now...
I got home on Saturday at 6:30 AM and had been traveling since 10:30AM Shanghai time on Friday, which was 8:30PM Thursday Minneapolis time. So 32 hours. I went home and showered and took a nap and then drove up to see my brother in Duluth MN which is a 2 1/2 hour drive. When I got to the hospital my mom and Kasey and Ben and Miyo were there. It was so good to see my brother. He is doing very well, just really really sleepy. His eye is looking around and he responds to questions. He will squeeze your hands, he held Miyo (kind of...he sort of had her in the crook of his arm and she looked at him, frowned that cute baby frown and then started screaming. We got a picture of it though.) So I felt a lot better about that. One of the women on my tour had her sister die while we were in Shanghai and she had to wait two days to get home to her family. It was so sad, and again I was glad my brother's accident wasn't more serious. I was also glad I didn't have to see the worst of it. Apparently when everybody got there initially he was on the breathing tube and his whole head was very swollen.
Before I left for the trip, I went to the doctor and got a prescription for Xanex, because on the last couple of trips I had taken I was having some anxiety about flying. Boy am I glad I did. Normally, I am not able to sleep on the plane. I just can't get comfortable, etc. Well on both of the 13 hour flights - from LA to Beijing and from Beijing to LA I was able to sleep very well. In fact in both cases I think I slept 10 of the 13 hours. I also took a Melatonin with the Xanex and the combination was just the thing I needed. I had a 9 hour layover in Los Angeles and a 4 hour flight to Minneapolis, and didn't sleep any of that time, so after Duluth and getting home, I slept from 11:30 Saturday night all the way until it was time to go to work today. I woke up a couple times to eat yesterday and that's it. I think I'm right as rain today? We'll see I might need another evening of sleeping.
On the tour there was a woman named Nan. She was in her 50s, and a real hag. The kind of person who felt the need to interrupt the tour guide with every stupid joke she could think of. The tour guide would say, "in Shanghai, the men are more likely to do more chores at home". Nan would burst in and say, "But not you David, right?" And the tour guide (probably because he had to) and the first three rows of the bus would laugh and laugh. I sat in the back of the bus with the cool people and stewed about how annoying she was the entire time. Or, at the Forbidden City David would explain a building, and she would ask a STUPID question about some imprint in a stone and go "Now David, what is this? What is the significance of this? Is it a frog?" On the bus, she would take off her shoes and socks and stick her bare foot on the back of the seat in front of her. Just a rude, rude annoying person, right? She insisted that she have an aisle seat on every flight and didn't mind everybody else having to be inconvenienced for it to happen.
So here's the scoop on the flight from Beijing to LA. I got on the plane last, LIKE I DO, and was so excited to see that I was in the aisle seat of a three-seat row, and there was nobody in the other two seats. After a few minutes I realized that I was going to have the WHOLE ROW TO MYSELF ALL THE WAY ON THE 13 HOUR FLIGHT. It was exactly the right size, and I would be able to sleep like I had a bed to myself the whole flight. It was so exciting. Especially because the flight was packed. Every time somebody would walk by me and not sit in those seats I would reach across the row and high five Kellie. When they shut the door I almost peed myself, could this really be happening? Well, out of the corner of my eye, I see NAN, waiting for her AISLE SEAT, and I'm like, crap. She is going to ruin this for me. And then, at the last minute they find her an aisle seat. So I was relieved. But on her way, she goes, "if nobody comes to sit by you, can I share your row? It's so crowded up there." (Meaning she probably had to sit by a Chinese person.) Well, I didn't want to be a selfish jerk, but come on! So I go, "didn't they find you your aisle seat?" And she huffed and was like, "fine, I'll go sit up there." And then we taxied and took off. I thought as soon as the fasten seat belt sign went off I would lay down and pretend to be sleeping so that I could fend off stupid old Nan because I knew she would be back. Well then I really wanted a glass of water so I could take my stupid Xanex so I waited for the drink cart and of course here comes Nan, barreling down the aisle and I didn't have time to react. She goes, "you know what Kady, I'm coming back here." So I had no choice and then she came back with all her STUFF. She was fine with the window seat of course, so the whole aisle seat thing was a big joke, just her being selfish. So she sat by the window and all her stuff took up the middle seat. So I just put my pillow on her hip, and laid down across the two seats and tried not to hate her stupid crappy mean selfish rude guts. But of course it didn't work. I am still mad about this by the way. I did sleep most of the flight but a couple times, I felt her get up and CRAWL OVER ME. She didn't wear her shoes, so when she came back from the bathroom I knew there was PEE on her socks and at one point she stepped on my arm.
She thanked me twice and said that I would get points in heaven for this. I was so irritated. I kept thinking, hmmm...and what do you get, points in HELL? Don't thank me, I don't want you here! This may make me seem so selfish. I guess I was mad because she lives in the LA area, and therefore would be home when we arrived in LA, but I had the 9 hour layover and the 4 hour flight to Mpls...also everybody else on the tour was jealous of me and my row, but nobody tried to horn in on it. It's like she saw something I had, and she wanted it, and so therefore she decided to take it.
I will be over this in about a year. I promise. It didn't ruin my trip though. I promise.

So, that's my trip. And the moral of the story is:
Travel. You will not regret it, even if a hag steps on your arm with her pee sock - travel. I have stood on the Great Wall, climbed a mountain at Macchu Picchu, stared at the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, golfed in Ireland and Scotland, gotten my hair cut for $5 in London, drank beer at Oktoberfest, ridden the subway in Prague, drank wine in Italy, pretended to push the leaning tower of Pisa back up, ridden a bicycle through the Alps in Austria, got stuck on the cockroach ferry from Gibraltar to Spain, etc. etc. etc.

Love,
Kady 'where to next?' Hexum