We arrive at the Airport, T3, and Yang’s father JiPing heads strait for the Air China line that has no people in front of it. This would not be the economy line nor the self check-in line. First class line. He shows his special acamedician card that lets him whisk us through even though we only have economy seats. Lydia and Aidan impress the counter lady with their Chinese. The counter people in China tend to be a lot nicer…and not just the first class ones. Not like the 10 cup of coffee with hemorrhoids types you can run into in the states. Yang disappears to get Elisa’s infant boarding pass and is gone a long time when she calls me and says they won’t allow her to take three kids on the plane and I need to come over with my passport. I start to comment that this is weird since she flew 13 hours from the states with the three kids and Qingdao is a short hop. So I wander over in the direction where she is (the airport is so big one needs GPS) but can’t find her. Turns out they relented and she had returned without me seeing her.
Aidan waiting for us to get our boarding pass. Lydia striking a pose. We get to Qingdao and to out hotel which …against my general inclination …is fabulous. Two big spacious bedrooms, open sitting area, small kitchen. The down side…and well the upside…is we are having a family immersion weekend. In other words, all kids, all the time. Our life here is so good and we have such an extended support system that we have to do the opposite of what couples in the states do…we need to get away…with our kids. And mostly we did just watch them, at least for the weekend, when I returned to Beijing to work and Yang stayed on w/kids to semi work for a couple more days. The bummer about Qingdao was it was cold and I am (was) damn tired of the cold. The winters here just grind on you and after a false spring a few weeks back it was almost too much to take to have the temperature drop to 30 degrees again. It did not deter us from going down to the rocking beach. After two days, chasing the kids in the cold, I felt like this Ok, this photo was actually taken in the art district near our apartment…the aptly named 798 district. Aidan and Lydia got in to the act too, And the nice thing about it…Spring has arrives. 75 degrees!