The Beijing X-perience!!

After the 12-hour flight, we had a couple hours to kill in the Beijing airport before we could check in for our next 12-hour flight to Melbourne. We did so by engaging in a heated money-spending-principles-when-you’re-unemployed debate.  One of those marriage bonding/learning experiences to add to the list (other notables so far include: what hair rats are and that they are not funny, also, on the hair front, thinning hair is also not funny and shouldn’t be commented on jokingly).  Then, when it came time to check in, there was some confusion about our Australian visas, which were linked to our passports electronically.  We needed to provide the visa number to the folks at the counter, which meant we had to get on the internet (easy enough at the airport, right?) to access our emails to scrounge up those rascal visa numbers.  To make a long story short, we spent the next three hours attempting to get to those numbers; loading the extremely slow web pages onto our laptops, finding out that gmail may be blocked by the Chinese government, bumming cell phones off friendly strangers, making international phone calls, etc.  Eventually we were successful, though I think it was the crying girl stunt that finally pulled it off.  We barely made it and we were surprised/relieved when we did.  Consequently, that next 12-hour flight felt like a piece of cake.  No photos were taken during this time.  No way.