The Longest Day

Let’s get this straight right from the start, I am not making any comparison to The Longest Day of my parents’ generation.

That said, getting to China takes awhile. Let’s look at my travel day.

I got up at the usual 6:45 AM (Pacific time) and went to work. I was able to put in a full day there before heading home. I had dinner and finished packing.

About 8:45 PM I headed for LAX for a 12:10 AM flight on Korean Airlines headed for Seoul. I give a lot of credit to KA. They have reasonable seat pitch and the seats recline quite a bit. I was able to sleep about 5 hours. It’s a 12.5 hour flight.

My only gripe with KA is that the flight attendants never desert the galleys during the flight. On most long flights the crew disappears and I can stand in the galley for two or three hours.

OK, we had a 3.5 hour layover in Seoul. That’s a great airport for transfers. You can take a shower and even get a massage. Unless you arrive at 4:30 AM when everything is closed. Oh, well.

The flight from Seoul to Qingdao is about 1.5 hours. Leave Seoul at 8:10 (Korean time) and arrive in Qingdao at 8:40 AM (China time). Pretty complete breakfast served on the flight.

We were met at the airport and delivered to Henry’s apartment where we showered. Then we watched the Lakers while Henry got a haircut.

Next stop was lunch. I had the best eggplant I have ever eaten. Grilled with many spices and whatnot.

In the afternoon we met with Henry’s graphic artist. She does all Henry’s advertising materials. From there we went to the Me Hoo office. Me Hoo is Henry’s business in Qingdao that sells American tools to Chinese factories. The Chinese know where to get quality tools.

After this we went to the cell phone store. Well, actually a block of shops that included 5 or 6 cell phone stores. Started with the one that had the most customers. We were looking for SIM cards for a couple of phones. Using my US phone would cost over $2 per minute. And every call in China would involve dialing an international call. By using a SIM from China I can make local calls for next to nothing, but I cannot make international calls. To do that I simply swap SIM cards.

The SIM cards cost 30 Yuan each. You get 35 Yuan worth of calls at 0.4 Yuan per minute. Something like 87 minutes. For $4.38. That will be plenty for my entire trip.

Being a bit pooped, we took a 1.5 hour nap before dinner.

Then we had the usual 12 dishes for 4 people for dinner. Mostly seafood at a restaurant overlooking a small boat harbor.

And to finish the evening we had a foot massage. Highly recommended. Some parts are a bit painful, but the results are well worth it.

Suffice it to say that I didn’t have trouble getting to sleep.