Our flight from Bangkok to Beijing was delayed... 5 hours. That's right. We were scheduled to leave at 7am. That means that Sylvan and I were up at 3am, at the airport at 4am, and delayed at 4:30am. Our flight was initially delayed and set to leave at 9:30, so we got breakfast and wandered around the Bangkok airport. We would have gone to our gate, but seeing as the flight was delayed, no gate was posted. After only 3 hours of sleep, we were exhausted. We found a comfy (sort of) spot to sit and waited it out until 8am, when we checked the monitors again. Our flight was further delayed and now scheduled to leave at noon. Sylvan and I, in our exhausted state, were in good spirits. We wandered further through the airport and thought about different games we could play while we waited for our flight. Our best ideas were hide and seek or a wicked scavenger hunt. We never actually played, but thinking about it was entertaining enough.
Since we had already gone through immigration, we couldn't leave the airport. We had officially been stamped out of Thailand but had not entered any other country. We were in some kind of airport limbo. Sri Lankan Air managed to strand us in the middle of the airport with no way to contact them. Since I like being in control and am generally impatient, I found an information kiosk and asked how to contact our phantom airline. The woman at the desk gave me a phone number and pointed to a phone. The man on the other line spoke english with an indian accent. I politely asked why our flight had been delayed and if they were anticipating any further delays. The man assured me that the flight would leave at noon. Then he asked if I had gotten my free meal voucher. I was instantly appeased. It was brilliant.
A free lunch later, I was still exhausted, but a little happier and we made it to our gate in time for our 12:15 flight, which actually left at 12:30. I've never flown with Sri Lanka but I would fly with them again. The flight announcements were in english and sounded very much like they normally do on a domestic flight in the States except somehow more sincere. When the announcer said, "It has been our pleasure to serve you" I believed that he was ACTUALLY pleased. The in-flight movie was "Made of Honor" staring the overly-popular but somehow still charming Patrick Dempsey. Major chick flick... it was exactly what I needed. Plus, we got a meal on the plane and Sylvan had two glasses of whiskey... at no extra cost. I won't mention the half hour of incredibly bad turbulence or the fact that someone two rows up from us threw up all over the place during the complimentary meal. Oops.
We got to Beijing at around 6pm, made it through customs, and attempted to figure out how to get to our hostel, The Temple Side Hostel. Because we're really smart, we had the address of the hostel. We didn't have the phone number, nor did we have a map, nor did we know where the hostel was on a map. We soon realized that no one at the airport would speak english so we asked a woman who was on our flight to translate the address from english to chinese. She wrote the characters in Sylvan's notebook. We then showed the characters to the woman selling bus tickets. She spoke chinese and pointed to a stop. "Xidan." I grabbed a map of Beijing from an information kiosk and we were on our way. It was dark out and I gazed out the window in awe of this new city. Beijing was lit up like a Christmas tree. Classier than the lights of Vegas, but incredibly over the top. The bus dropped us at Xidan, which happened to be a huge shopping mall. We found the street that matched the address of the hostel and determined that the hostel was off of an alley. As I mentioned before, Beijing is HUGE. It appeared that our hostel was within walking distance of Xidan so we started walking. We tried to ask people for directions but no one seemed to recognize the street or the address. Most people pointed the way we were going so we continued. A young man who spoke a little English approached us and tried to help us. He grabbed our map and the address with one hand. His other hand held a half eaten cob of corn. He ran around frantically asking security guards and locals if they knew they way. No one did. After running us around in circles for 15 minutes, he tried to get us onto a bus and we thanked him, but decided to continue walking. A mile or so later, another guy who spoke a little bit of English tried to help us using the same technique. It was mildly amusing but it was nearly 9pm and we'd been walking for over an hour. I was hungry and tired. I thought we were close to where the hostel should be, but was still unsure. The man told us which bus to get on and where to get off. This time we got on the bus. Once off the bus, we realized that we were getting desperate and weren't necessarily any closer to finding the hostel. We went to an upscale hotel in the hopes that someone there might speak English. They didn't. We decided to walk back to where we had gotten on the bus and look for the alley. It was nearly 10pm when we got back to the bus stop. Sylvan and I were hungry, tired, worried we wouldn't find it, and losing patience with each other.
Sylvan spotted the "TempLe Side" (that's literally how it was written) sign and our hope was restored. We looked around and saw no signs of a hostel. We walked down the dark alley and around a corner. We spotted another sign. 100m or so down the alley and around two or three corners we finally found the Temple Side Hostel. We knocked on the door and checked in. I have no idea how we found it.
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