Day 1 - Melbourne to Beijing via Shanghai

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The day started early. After only drifting in and out of sleep between 1:00am and 5:00am it was time to get up, finish packing, have a shower, breakfast and head of to Melbourne Airport. We stopped off on the way in Prahran to pick up Mary and made it to the airport just after 7:20am.
We took some quick photos with our luggage then made our way to check-in, go through customs and sit around waiting at our departure gate only to realise on our ticket that we were seated separtely even though we had checked-in together.
Our flight was to depart Melbourne at 10:05am but we didn't end up leaving until about 10:50am. My goodness it's a long flight, even just to get us to Shanghai, China - our first stop. It was 10 or so hours of uncomfortable sleep, swallon feet with some sadness thrown in.
We only figured out how to use the in-flight entertainment with 3hrs of flight time left where we got in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. Before that we watched The Clash of the Titans.. twice. At least it was a good movie, and gave us a lil look at Greek Mythology. The food on the plane was pretty good; one meal was chicken and rice and a few other things and dinner was chicken and noodles.
We got into 31degree, extremely muddy Shanghai, China at about 7:30pm local time and had to go through customs before catching our domestic flight to Beijing. This flight left over an hour late due to our catering apparently accidently being put on the wrong plane so then they had to organise new catering for ours. We eventually made it to our hotel in Beijing just before 1:00am.
It was so nice to get in a real bed after hardly any sleep for neally 48hrs. The hotel was okay, a business one that was organised for us by Air China. we didn't have our bags as our luggage was checked throught to London so all we had was what we had, almost nothing. Only what we had on. All we really wanted was sleep anyway.

x

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