Hello everyone! We have arrived safely in Beijing, only 5weeks after we decided to actually come.

First things first, the flight. We flew with Sri Lankan Airlines, and it was two 10hour flights with a 10hour stop over in Sri Lanka (ouch!).  The main thing I will say about the journey is this, it was long and uncomfortable, but the airline itself is great. The planes were old, but the food was actually really nice and the staff were friendly. The stewardesses wore blue saris with peacock feather designs on them and looked absolutely beautiful. The first flight was delayed by about an hour and a half, and the plane had a really old entertainment system – it had 4 films you could watch, but you had to wait for a film to start on a channel before you could watch it. I watched Oblivion (terrible movie) and then couldn’t find anything else to watch so had a nap instead. Then once I woke up, I had to wait 45mins until another film started. Not ideal, but better than nothing!

The stop over in Sri Lanka was not pleasant. It’s a really small airport, with very few facilities, there were only 2 little coffee shops, nowhere that you could really buy food, so not great. We tried to get some rest by sleeping in shifts, but when Allan was asleep I got this weird Indian bloke come up to me. Once he established that I wasn’t going to leave my sleeping boyfriend to go get a drink with him, he started trying to buy my phone and my Kindle off of me. Needless to say this freaked me out, so I had to wake Allan up so we could move somewhere else. It’s something I know happens a lot in Asian countries but I wasn’t awake enough to deal with it at that point!

The second flight was an odd one. The plane was slightly newer, so had a better entertainment system. It was like an iPad in the back of the seat so you could just pick what you want and start it straight away, which made it much easier. This was especially good as it was impossible to sleep on this flight, as it stopped 3 times. Like a bus. I did not know that any flight did that, and from talking to our friends here in Beijing, and the agency we’ll be working with, they didn’t know it either! We took off from Sri Lanka, and landed about 40mins later in Mattala. People got off, more people got on, and roughly an hour later, we set off for Bangkok. This took about 3hours, then we sat there for another hour or so while more people got off, and more arrived, before we took off again. Then it was a 4hour journey to Beijing. It was good in a way as it didn’t feel quite as long because it was broken up by several take offs and landings, but at the same time, I could’ve really done with getting some sleep at that point! One thing that really annoyed me is that, on one of the very few occasions I managed to drop off, one of the not-so-nice stewardesses actually put my seat up while I was still asleep, to serve food to the person behind me, rather than waking me up and asking me to move it. I was NOT happy, as I’m sure you can imagine, but it was the only real annoyance on the whole journey so it was good on the whole.

We arrived at 2am local time, and got through Immigration really quickly and got our money changed up. There was a bit of an issue when we got out of the airport as the people picking us up had come in a VW Beatle and we didn’t think our cases would fit in so we had to shove one between us on the back seat. As we arrived in the dark, we didn’t get to see Beijing on the drive, but what we could see is that the buildings are HUGE! Almost every building is at least 10 storeys high, and it makes the city feel even bigger and more imposing than it already is. We are currently staying in an apartment while we look at other potential ones, but we are considering staying here as it is really nice. When we make our final decision, I will post photos of it!

I will write more soon, including photos and the tale of our apartment hunt!