My first visit to China (day 1)

This is my first visit to china. (Thanks to my company). My boss Dave asks me to get a reference guide (Lonely Planet, China) to take a look at what places to see in and around. The book seems pretty good, he give me a good show and tell of whats around places where we will stay. We plan to fly into Beijing, see how the city has transformed itself to prepare for Olympics. So I' am all excited right....

Woke up way early for my pickup from Raja tours, he drops me around 5:15am, breeze past ticketing. Excited to see scanners at ticketing, which scans passports, and also scans and checks validity of VISA to china.. phenomenal!

Now we also get boarded for a 7:30am takeoff... then the pilot calls for at tension. He says "People i get all kinds of lights which i turn the engine on.. not a good sign :-)". So we wait for maintenance crew to come assess the damage. Finally they call it a day and say the flight is not getting anywhere. So we all rush out, waiting for out turn to be called a number we were assigned on the Jetway.

Dave tries to work his magic to see if we can get some way out before the hold on the SFO airport is lifted. Apparently due to weather the runway is on hold and no flights takeoff or land. Dave was more hopeful that the situation is not that bad... Finally our #25 gets called, the agent works her magical fingers and manages to get us out tomorrow.. early 1AM flight out of LA via Air China. Not sure what the maintenance @Air China is, but we decided to trust them this time :-)

Working away with the free wireless in PDX, and typing something up my blog with some real content.. i.e more than 3 or so lines i have written in the past several months since i created an account. I don't know how others manage to do this... I' am worried i will expose my grammar to others.... Crap i don't care anymore...

so we are waiting in this wonderful Red Carpet club (thanks to Dave for extending all the compliments my way).. this is wonderful in spite of the delay.

Hopefully good luck is coming our way and China Air would not overbook or bump us...

Lots of time to chat with Dave... we discuss about Spitzer :-), religion, food abroad and spread out with some work discussions...

For people who don't know Dave... he is one who can just have a slide and talk/blog/dance (??? maybe)...for an hour, very interesting and engaging personality... (its focal time, damn.. i have to say something good er else :-)


I will keep you posted....

BTW: don't worry about any grammar mistakes...English is after all my 2' nd language :-) If anything is left... its the bad spellchecker not me!