The flight to Chengdu

On my new year eve post, I toasted to adventure. And adventure was what we got on our flight to Chengdu. What was supposed to be an 18 hour travelling time for Helsinki-Munich-Beijing-Chengdu, already an arduous journey in my opinion with a 5 month old baby, turned into a more than 24 hour trip. The Air China Beijing-Chengdu flight was delayed for 6 hours due to bad weather and it was made worse by the lack of information when it would actually take off. Apparently, Chengdu wasn't the only destination affected. Our first encounter with China was actually a very angry mob at the Air China ticketing counter where several folks had missed connecting flights and meetings. Very high octane and decibel exchanges :P

When we *finally* got onto the Chengdu bound flight, there was tremendous relief that we were finally on our way. However, when we disembarked on the tarmac, we were amazed that it was a rather small terminal. (For Finns, the airport was really similar to the Rovaniemi airport) We took pictures of the sign that said "Chengdu" with an arrow and of the Air China plane. When we tried to get out of customs, we were told that no, that wasn't Chengdu after all; we were in fact in Dazhou :D At this point, you were probably thinking that we boarded the wrong flight and although that would be quite a story, we were thankfully at a transit stop. The Chengdu flight (same plane) left half an hour later and after 45 minutes, we were finally there. By then, it was nearly midnight and all of us seriously jet-lagged.

Poor minibeanie was a little confused with his sleeping and eating habits.


minibeanie is 5 months, 2 weeks & 1 day old