The Flight Home

It was kind of strange telling Juliet that we were taking her "home", since home is halfway around the world and a place she's never visited before. Nonetheless, she held up very bravely on our connection from Guangzhou to Beijing, and from Beijing back to Newark, New Jersey.

Here are some fun shots from the Beijing airport. First, Windows apparently still crashes in Chinese.


Second, the connecting corridor between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 had these wonderful bamboo trees growing along its windows, providing shade. Linda called them a "bamboo curtain", for which we chastisted her, since the Cold War is long over.


These shots are also from the walk from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2. Joyce was carrying Juliet in the Baby Bjorn, and with Linda in front, Juliet decided that eating Linda's backpack was the right thing to do.





Linda mentioned in her blog that we hit some impressive turbulence about an hour out of Beijing. I was jolted awake, and one of the overhead compartments sprung open, spraying Joyce and Juliet with orange juice (my guess is that the flight staff were storing the OJ there). It was pretty rough for a few minutes; as rough as I've felt in a commercial aircraft. One thing I don't understand is that the turbulence coincided with the Mongolia-China border, and that as soon as we hit it, we started a long banking turn to starboard that was visible on the trip computers. Did we really hit turbulence, or was it a glitch in the automatic flight control system, making a sudden change to the controls when we switched from one vector to another?