Back on the ground

I left Indy at around 11:30am and arrived in Shenzhen at around 8:00am the next day (that's 8:00pm in China...at least you don't have to reset your watch!) The flight wasn't as bad as I expected. You sort of get lulled into a place where time stops meaning anything. Given the usual content of these pages, I maintained a list of what I have eaten thus far:

Courtesy of United Airlines:
spicy pretzel/nut mix
ginger ale
chicken and rice (more like salt and rice), roll, salad, banana bread, fruit cup
Diet Coke
2004 Canepa Cabernet Sauvignon (icky Chilean red wine drunk only to induce sleep)
bowl of Chinese (read...Ramen) Noodles. Again with the salt.
an almond cookie
2 Luna bars, packed by my wife. "Nutrition for women" it says on the wrapper. I'll let you know if I'm a C cup in the morning.

While flying, I took lots of notes and observations. It gave me something to do. Here's a pretty much unedited list of my thoughts while airborn between Chicago and Hong Kong:

Man there's lots of Chinese people on here.
I sure wish these guys would stop sitting on and playing with the exit door.
The guy at the end of my row squeezed his plastic wrapped dinner roll and treated it as though it smelled rotten, yet he ate McDonalds an hour into the flight from under his seat.
The line for the toilets is at Disney World levels after the chicken/rice lunch.
I changed seats before takeoff, because the guy next to me had, what I consider to be, a disturbing cough. I saw "Outbreak."
Oooh...I'll get to see "Nacho Libre" finally.
(At this point, I wrote "13 hrs to go!")
Glass of wine didn't help me sleep. 10.5 hrs to go.
The ice over the arctic circle looks unbelieveable out the window. Too bad my picture didn't really turn out.
Listening to My Brightest Diamond on the iPod. Makes me miss Erin.
8 hrs left. This isn't so bad. I'm getting hungry.
Slept through the beginning of "Inside Man." Looks like film watching is a bust on this trip.
SNACK!!!!!! Oh, for joy!
Why are they serving me Ramen soup with chop sticks. Soup with sticks?!

Well if you read this far, you're a trooper. If you're interested, check out a globe for my route. We flew north from Chicago to a city called Churchill on the Hudson Bay in Canada. The next indicator I saw had us approaching the Verkhoyanskiy Mountains of Siberia. Next stop was Hong Kong.

I'm beat. I'll try and get some pictures tomorrow of the area around the hotel and work. We had a quick dinner at the hotel restaurant tonight. I had fried rice with shrimp and pork in it. I couldn't bear to eat a cheeseburger as my first meal in Asia. Looks like the week will be an adventure...