Day of Departure

This morning we woke at 5.15am with some excitement and left home at 5:45am, full of anticipation. Joanna dropped us off at the Morisset station in the pre-dawn semi-darkness. We caught the 6:00am train which would get us to the international terminal at 8:15am. By coincidence, we met Paul Hughes at the train station and he joined us in the carriage travelling to the airport. He works at the domestic airport maintaining the Tiger airplanes. We discussed our trip to France and he had some interesting insights having been to France many times. We said goodbye to him at the domestic station and travelled one station further to the international terminal.

Checking in and proceeding through customs in Sydney was very efficient and we had time to eat breakfast and grab a coffee before boarding. We also visited the chemist and purchased some Fishermans Friends and various other pharmaceutical remedies to repel my sore throat which has chosen a very inopportune moment

to attack.

Priscilla had been concerned about inconveniences Air China might have in store for her but her fears proved unfounded. We had good seats and plenty of leg-room, much more than domestic airlines. The plane was an A330 with an entertainment system throughout and a seating configuration of 2,4,2. We were in the middle but had a spare seat next to us so no sense of being cramped. Priscilla was able to make good progress on her latest knitting project, a young girls jacket for an unknown and unwitting recipient.

The plane took off from Sydney at 10:50am, about 30 minutes behind schedule. We landed at Shanghai at 7:00pm (9:00pm AEST) after a 10 hour flight. We spent about 5 hours in transit in the Shanghai airport. The lack of Chinese yen made it difficult to buy anything but Burger King accepted credit card so we ate some familiar food -

burgers and fries.

Shanghai airport is huge so there is plenty of comfortable seating available to spread out and relax. Priscilla was able to get quite a bit of knitting done.

Our second flight was about an hour late leaving Shanghai but we had a row of four seats to ourselves which put us in good spirits for the second leg of the journey. Priscilla spent the first 6 hours or so lying quite comfortably across three seats and sleeping. I took the second shift. It made the 12 hour flight pass reasonably quickly.