I found out, just minutes ago, that Muse has a (fairly) new song called Neutron Star Collision (Love is Forever) which interested me until I read the description… It’s in the Twilite series. I’m not sure how to feel about that. Even the music video is filled with Edward and Bella’s sparkly vampire adventures. No offense to Twilite fans. I’ve personally read the series and I have to say that it’s nothing more than a very cheesy romance novel that got really popular because of the vampire aspect, or perhaps a brilliant publisher and marketing team. I actually have a friend who shares my love of Muse, but believes that the Twilite series is a crime against humanity. I’m fairly certain that when I break this news on him, he’s going to “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU” for approximately the next several years… I’m looking forward to it.

I bought a Sony Handycam yesterday. ;D My dad bought a video camera when we were in Shanghai this summer and it made me realize how nice it would be to have one. I’m not sure if my bank account can handle the hit, but it was still a worthwhile buy. I also bought myself a PS2 slimline for $60. It was used, but I still can’t believe the price has gone down so much. I think it was a worthwhile buy since my PS3 isn’t backwards compatible (*sad*). I already had a 16 gig memory pro 2 duo that I wasn’t using (haha…) and the case I bought came with an extra battery, so I’m pretty much all set to go.

Other than that, I’ve just been working a lot, I suppose. I went to the dentist earlier this week and she told me something scary. She said dentists usually fill a cavity with silver, which expands and cracks the tooth so you have to get a crown, then the crown irritates the roots so you have to get a root canal, then the root canal eventually decays (or something like that) and you have to get an implant. Apparently, that’s what dentists (who give you silver fillings) are ultimately aiming for when they give you silver fillings… in order to make more money. I freaked out a little when I heard her say it because I’ve had the same dentist almost my entire life and I always liked him well. I was pretty resistant to changing dentists… but I’m not any more.

School starts soon! Is everyone ready? XD

Oh my. It’s been longer than I thought since the last time I updated. I’ve been kind of busy with work, kind of busy catching up on things like anime, and kind of busy trying to reorganize and straighten my room so that it’s not as cluttered (so far, not too successful). But I’m not dead, I swear. I’ve just been wasting time (chasing cars~) for the most part. On my birthday, my mom took my friends and I to this club called the Brews Brothers in the Eldorado, a Casino downtown. It was loud and really crowded and hot, so the effort I took to curl my hair was immediately wasted, not that I really cared. I bought a really cute black ruffle dress… which I proceeded to wear the next night at karaoke and the day after that while running errands, haha. I didn’t feel like I got enough use out of it. Oh, I suppose I should mention that I drank too much. We spent a little bit of time playing blackjack, during which I quickly lost $40, and following that, we found a small hole-in-the-wall bar called Aqua with a really talented flare bartender… Mixed drinks can be very dangerous because once you have a shot in you, it’s very difficult to taste the alcohol. o.0 After about six shots in half an hour, the world started tilting and apparently, I’m an incredibly amusing spectacle when drunk. XD

Michelle loves board games, and we’ve been playing them a lot lately, but since the board games she already had were starting to get old, I went out and bought a couple of new ones. I bought the electronic monopoly, which I recently played for the first time, an awesome (but expensive) game called Blockus, which is like a modified Tetris in real life, and Chinese Checkers, which we still haven’t gotten to because we’ve been playing Blockus, haha. It’s a great game and it’s definitely a good investment if you like board games, although it costs nearly $30.

As for work, I did get my job back at my old pay. Fun, fun. My manager gave me my own alarm code and keys too, and has been sending me to the bank in the mornings, so I can now open and close by myself (yay). I’ve been mostly working at the beginning of the week, eight hour shifts on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, then a break, then a few hours on the weekend. Although my feet hurt by Monday afternoon, I certainly can’t complain about the pay. Besides, I know once school starts, our payroll and my availability are going to drop. Speaking of school, I signed up for classes. This is probably as full as my schedule has ever been. I threw in a music class and a criminal justice class, which I’m looking forward to. I wonder why it never occured to me to take a CRJ class before. I’d mostly been focusing only on classes I needed, so I didn’t take enough credits each semester and I’ve fallen somewhat behind, but I’m not worried about it.

I bought a VHS to DVD converter today from Wal Mart. The last one I bought could record vhs, and it could record dvds, but it couldn’t run a feed from one to the other at the same time, so unfortunately, it couldn’t do what I wanted it to do. I returned it, then did a bit of googling and found out that Wal Mart carried the “upgraded” version of the product, but it was something you could only get online. Some of the reviews mentioned malfunctions, but nobody had any trouble returning it and nobody complained about any problems once they were replaced, so I have high hopes.

Anyway, it’s late and I’ve somehow managed to mess up my sleeping schedule (I say somehow like it’s a new thing), so I better get to bed. ;o

P.S. Thank you for the cake, Ongaku.

I’m still alive, I swear. After getting back from China, I’ve had a lot to do. Besides work (I had to reapply for my job because I was gone for so long! D;), I’ve been spending time with my best friend, her boyfriend, and of course, Branden, and I’ve also worked at unpacking and sorting out all the nonsense in my room, so I haven’t been online much. But, before I go any further, I’d like to congratulate Pauline on finally getting engaged! I’m so happy for you. ;D

So yesterday, Michelle, Chris, Branden and I went to Wild Island, the local waterpark and we went swimming in the Truckee River the day before. The river was cold and the rocks hurt my feet. The man made slides were scary and the only time I went on one was by accident when I got dragged in. D; I’m a giant baby like that. Michelle lent me her crocs and I wore them in the river, but in one of the sink holes, Branden lost the ring that I bought him for his birthday. *cry* Other than that… my birthday is coming up. My boss gave me my birthday (wednesday) until Saturday off next week, lol. I interpret that as she expects me to be drunk from wednesday until Saturday. D; My mom is already making plans to get me into night clubs on Tuesday night. I think I’m a little scared. XD Anyway, I’ll update again soon, hopefully. ;o

When we woke up this morning, we did our morning stuff and went to Suzhou. It’s a city about an hour and a half’s drive away from the university in Shanghai. Before we left, we sprayed down the entire apartment with Raid, lol. We left probably at a quarter ’til 11 and got there at around lunch time, so the first thing we did was stop for lunch. After lunch, we hit the street. Apparently, the city is famous for its historically preserved homes, and that’s what we visited. The first one we visited was full of big, porous. o.0 We climbed around them and I got lost trying to get out. D; My grandma said she overheard a tour guide saying that Jackie Chan also got lost and asked me if I was Jackie Chan. o.o;;

The second place we went to had a large pond that was full of lilly pads and giant gold fish. Olivia and I spent some time feeding the fish crackers in a secluded area we’d found, but before long, we were attracting people to us because all the fish were pooling together. In some places, there are people who sell fish food, and if you feed the fish there, there are so many of them that they climb all over each other, almost out of the water, trying to get something to eat. I wondered earlier today if maybe that food makes them crazy, lol. After we got out of the second place, it was hot and stuffy, and we were tired. My feet were killing me. We got back in the car and drove towards Shanghai, but we stopped in a city along the way and grabbed dinner in a cheap place with a lot of spicy food. The spicy food was really annoying because I can’t really handle it, so there wasn’t much for me to eat. On the drive back, we noticed that they had hung some icicle lights from the trees during a long stretch of the street we were on and I thought they looked like a row of dangling stars. I almost want to go back home and do it myself. It was another half an hour before we got home, and now my dad and I are watching Without a Trace again, lol. He said last night, he watched three episodes without me. I don’t think I really got him hooked, nor do I think he finds it as interesting as Bones, but my dad’s the kind of person who has to finish anything he starts. I’m the same way… That’s how I ended up reading all of the Twilite series, even though it was just cheesy romance.

We went shopping a few days ago to a place called Chen Hua Miao. It’s actually a tourist attraction in Shanghai. It’s a large shopping area, but the buildlings are old Chinese architecture. My mom had asked me to buy some brooches if I saw any nice ones, so while we were walking around, we wandered into a jewelry store where I saw some gorgeous ruby rings. Being a July baby, ruby is my birthstone and I’ve always loved them. My dad saw me looking at them and he asked me if I liked them. I said I did and he said he’d buy it for me! I was taken by surprise. I picked out a simple oval stone with four tiny diamonds and a slim 18k rose gold band. It was $585. O.O But I really appreciate it. My dad has never bought me a ring before because he doesn’t understand the concept of gemstones. He says they’re too expensive for rocks, and that he could just pick one up off the ground and make it into a ring, haha. He didn’t even buy my mom an engagement ring, just a gold wedding band. He gave me a ruby ring once before that he’d bought for my grandma, which I really liked. She didn’t wear it because it was too small for her, so when she saw I could wear it, they agreed to let me have it. It was the most unique ruby I’d ever seen. Most natural rubies are clear and a pinkish red. This one was a dark red, almost crimson, and it was solid like an opal instead of clear. Unfortunately, the ruby fell out one day when I was at school. I was so depressed when I got home and saw the empty ring.

I can’t believe we’re going to be going home in just a few days. For some reason, I’m feeling anxious. Probably because I know there are a lot of things to take care of once we get there. Also, I’ve always hated the plane ride. It just takes too long. I’ve never gotten used to it. We bought new suit cases yesterday because we have too much stuff. ~.~;

I decided to remove my calendar because looking at it was pressuring me to write more often. I think I’m going to make a couple of other changes to my menu when I get home… in only a week! Coming to China is a lot of fun because I get to spend time with my family and I don’t have to do anything while I’m here, but I also get homesick because there’s nothing I have to do, which gets boring, and there are things I need to do when I get home, which is making me nervous. I also miss Branden and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about seeing him again. I can’t believe so much time has passed so quickly.

Michelle has officially moved in. It looks like my mom’s isn’t going to take care of the situation as a landlord the way she should, so when I get home, I’m going to have to sit down and have a nice long talk with the two of them to get everything set up so that I don’t have to get caught in the middle of it… because if I do, it’s not going to be pretty from any direction, and I don’t want that to happen.

When we go back, I’m going to miss sitting around, talking to my dad when I want to, spending time with my grandma, having my meals prepared every night by some house help (they’re pretty cheap here), eating barbeque chicken on a stick from street stands, going for walks around the campus at night, watching pirated TV series purchased from the street at 4 yuen a disk and all the other things I do every day here. Coming here every year is my chance to run away from reality. It’s my own little pocket of relaxation that I can’t really get any other time of the year… And yet I’m ready to go back. I’ve been having dreams that I’m late for work, I can’t wait to get back to my own room and my own computer, and my own internet, my photoshop, my adobe premiere, my ps3, board games, my friends. I guess what this boils down to is I’m happy, and I feel very lucky to have the life I have.

I’m watching Germany vs England in the World Cup play offs today. Being American, and generally uninterested in sports to begin with, I don’t usually both watching it on TV, but a couple of days ago, I got what felt like a knife trying to tear its way out of my stomach and what, in reality, was probably mild food poisoning. It was really painful, and after five hours, I was so tired and worn out that I couldn’t stand the thought of another wave of pain, so I asked my dad to take me to the hospital. If you’ve never been to a hospital in China, then you may not know how much they like… needles. To treat a common cold and slight (100 degress fahrenheit, about 40 degrees Celsius) fever, they give you six shots over the course of three days on the butt. They didn’t actually TEST me for food poisoning, but after hearing my symptoms and poking my stomach, the doctor sent me to get a blood test. I’ve only previously had one experience with a blood test. A woman cut into the line of the inside of my elbow with a scalpel and drew blood by placing the needle next to the blood that flowed out. It hurt to to bend my arm for a week. But like I said, they like needles, so the nurses are pretty adept with them. She got it on the first try and it didn’t hurt nearly as much as my stomach did. After the blood test, they had me do something else that’s common: an IV drip. There’s actually an IV drip room. They push the needle into a vein on the back of your hand. It was 2am and there was nothing to do, so my dad and I… escaped. It was totally his idea. He just picked up my IV bag and we got into the car, lol. We came home and watched the world cup, Spain vs Chile for a couple of hours, and I’m pretty interested now. I’ve never bothered watching it because of the hours. 10pm-12am in China is 7am-9am back home, and I’m often not awake until noon. Anyway, in the game of England vs Germany, one guy on England made a goal almost immediately after their first goal. It barely went in and bounced back out. It would have tied the game, but the referee called it as a no goal. The slow motion replay showed that it DID, in fact, go into the goal. My dad said that referee would be gone by tomorrow. I felt so bad for the team and for the guy who kicked it in because he looked so despaired when it was called. They ended up losing 4-1, so it’s not like it would have made a difference, but that’s definitely the kind of thing where a referee’s decision should be overrulable.

What else is there to talk about? My mom woke me up early (in my book, 8:40am) with a phone call telling me that my best friend was moving in. It was something we’d been talking about since Michelle and her grandmother got into a huge fight over something pretty trivial. Anyway, they were living together and Michelle left that house after the fight. She moved in with her mom, but I recently found out that she only had until the first of July to move out (her mom doesn’t have an income and therefore has no means of supporting her). My mom is charging her a reduced rent ($100/mo) in exchange for her help around the house, which Olivia and I are terrible at providing, lol… <.<;;

In other news, my dad bought me a pair of ?700 Italian leather shoes while I was in the hospital today doing my second round of IV medication. My grandmother freaked out when he told her how much they were, which is understandable since a medium-quality pair of shoes is probably about ?100. They’re really comfortable, they smell nice (lol) and look nice. My dad always ends up buying me sandals when I come back because I never buy them for myself. It’s too bad our dress code at work doesn’t let us wear casual sandals, and I wouldn’t be able to wear an outside brand either way, but I really like them, lol. I’m just glad they came in my size. Anywho, off to bed. o.o

Oh. I realized that I never talked about the bug thing in my last post. There was a giant fly on the wall above my bed last week, and when I killed it, I looked up to realize there were a lot of little flies crawling around the ceiling. I think I killed six of them. I get spiders in my room a lot too. They’re worse in the summer and it’s one of the two things I really dread about this season (the other being the fact that my house has no form of air conditioning). If I see a spider in my room, even though it scares me, I always kill it. I haven’t seen any since I found two on my ceiling last May before I went to China. I trapped them in a big plastic cup, covered the cup with a piece of paper and a box of writable DVDs, and left the country for five weeks. I like to think word got around…

I hate them so much, I decided to make a tag because I expect to right more about it, and I think it might entertain me if I ever look back on my posts using that tag as a filter. :D Oh, an alternative title for this post is, “Wednesday is also game night!”, because… it is. To be honest, though, tonight was the first night they’ve played on a Wednesday since I got here a little over a month ago. The first week, I arrived on Wednesday at midnight, the next week, they cancelled because my dad and I went to the Frankfurt Philharmonic, the week after that, Lili went to dinner with some friends. Then, Olivia arrived, so we cancelled, then Peng Bing went to some province on vacation with her daughter. I was actually really surprised because Olivia and I were watching Arrested Development when she asked if the person talking in the living room was our dad. He had come home early, and Lili was there too, so I was surprised… I might have greeted her with, “What are you doing here?” and in retrospect, I hope it didn’t come out in a rude way. I just have no sense of the days anymore, and Peng Bing didn’t show up until after dinner, so I didn’t quite know what was going on until I realized it was Wednesday.

I got to talk to Branden a little bit earlier today. My mom called at 8:30am to let us know that she had arrived home safely, and I had been up until 2:30am the previous night watching “ef~ a tale of memories,” so it was a little early for me, lol. My mom actually called Olivia’s cell phone, but then she went from talking to Olivia to talking to me, then she handed the phone to Branden, who was apparently hanging out with Chris (Michelle, my best friend’s, boyfriend). I was barely awake anyway, so I didn’t have much to say. I wake up really slowly and I can be pretty grumpy if I’m woken up. XD We did manage to talk a bit later in the day on msn, but not for very long. I think I’m getting homesick. I shouldn’t be surprised, because this does always end up happening if I stay for two months. A month to a month and a half is about the perfect amount of time for me, but if I stay a month, my grandmother complains that my stay is too short. My dad tells me that she’s lonely in the house by herself. Since he lives in this apartment with her, and he works from 8am-6pm, she’s by herself for the better part of the day most days. She does take a nap in the afternoon and plays mah jong from 3pm-5pm, but I’m sure she gets lonely. My dad told me last year it’s because she’s still adjusting to my grandfather’s death, which happened only last January, and that makes me feel very sad for my poor little Chinese grandmother. She can be hard to talk to sometimes. Although I’m sure she doesn’t mean to, she can say some annoying things. She berrates us any time she thinks we’re not eating something, and she’s not the only one. I think it’s pretty commonplace in this country, but I don’t understand the purpose of it.

Olivia and I went to the Expo yesterday. My dad suddenly went out at around 8:30pm on Monday, and he came home at aroud 9:30pm with a video camera, lol. So when we went to the Expo, I wanted to record some footage of the inside so my grandmother could see. She could go if she wanted to, but she’d have to go in a wheelchair. Her legs are weak and she couldn’t possibly do the amount of walking that’s required for a day at the Expo. When we got there, we headed straight for the ferry. Unfortunately, that was an hour wait in a noisy, crowded line. When we finally got to the other side of the river, Pudong, we headed straight for Zone C (we were in Zone A, and it’s a significant walk to get to the other side of the Expo) in order to find the France Pavilion. We would have taken a bus, but the line was ridiculous, so we walked on the elevated walkway instead, which I think is a wonderful feature. I was able to get a shot of quite a few pavilions just on our journey. When we finally got to the Europe side, we had to ask some Expo Volunteers to find our way. The area’s huge and there’s a lot of tall walkways and big buildings blocking your view, so it’s easy to get lost. Before we made it to France, we found Germany, where we stopped to have some German beer. I’m not much of a drinker and I’ve never really liked the taste of beer, but I thought it was a worthwhile experience and the taste truly is different. After a little research (we looked at our map!), I notice that France was… right next to Germany. Surprise! So when we finished our beer, we got in line for the France pavilion. The wait was an hour and a half, and I don’t really know if it was worth the wait, but going inside gave us a good idea of what the inside looked like, lol. My grandma kept telling everyone about how the last time I went to the Expo, I walked around until I got tired, didn’t go into any of the pavilions because of the long lines, and then came home because I was hungry and couldn’t read any of the menus. All of that was true, except I think the outsides of the buildings are mostly more interesting than the insides, and you don’t have to wait in line to see them. Also, I wish I had realized that day that every pavilion had a restaurant. I might have stayed longer, but I still wouldn’t have stayed as long as they liked because earlier that day, I had tried, but failed to get an Expo Passport and I didn’t want to wait in lines for several hours if I couldn’t get my passport stamped, only to have to return later (I was pretty determined to get that passport) and stand in the same line just for a stamp. Oh… France Pavilion’s stamp was broken.

After we got out of the France Pavilion, we went to the restaurant in the Switzerland Pavilion. The menu was small, but the food was good. The menu was in courses, meal 1, 2 or 3. You would buy one and recieve veggies, meat and cheese and some bread for an appetizer, a meat dish and a side dish or two for the entree and then desert. The portions were smaller than anything you’d see in America, but they were even and it felt like eating just the right amount. Unfortunately, when we went to pay the bill, we discovered that we were short. We had brought 700 yuen with us, spent 100 on the beer and only had 602 left. Our bill was 620. After some calls, our dad said he would meet us in an hour, which is what we told the cashier and the manager. They let us leave, but Olivia insisted on the phone that our dad didn’t have to drive for an hour just to pay 18 yuen. I wasn’t okay with just skipping the remainder when they had let us leave on good faith, but our dad said we would go back at a later date and give them the money we owed them. I just feel really guilty because I know they probably hate us and it was our fault.

After that fiasco, we browsed the Expo at night. Some of the lights are actually on all day, like Switzerland, but the view is colorful and nice to look at, lol. We found some short lines in Africa, like Angola and Algeria, and went in to browse. In the end, we did manage to get a couple of stamps, lol!

Wow, I can’t believe I still have more to say. I already feel like this is the longest post ever, so feel free to stop reading at any time. Anyway, lately, I’ve been feeling kind of overwhelmed. This always happens to me right around this time of year because I never sign up for my classes early, so I always end up worrying about what to do about my schedule and what classes to take while I’m in China… and can’t do anything about it. I’ve also been kind of wound lately because my linkshell is changing leadership. The last two founders of the linkshell, and the people who pretty much been running everything for the past year or more, Rylei and Kiali, are leaving the game. I know that Empire’s not going to be the same without them, and I’m kind of torn about whether I want to stay with the linkshell, which is going to be under new leadership (I really don’t adapt well to change… … …) or if I’m going to leave. I can’t make up my mind. I certainly have reasons to want to stay, and reasons to want to leave, but my gut is telling me to run like hell before the ship goes crashing down. I’ve even thought about leaving the server. If I make that decision though, I want to make it clean. I don’t want any sneakiness, or any lies, or any drama and even though I’m afraid of what others may think of me if I leave (hence, why I want to leave the server…) I also don’t want them to hate me or think badly of me. I want to wait and see, because I think it might all be okay, but on the other hand, I don’t know if I can handle endgame anymore. I’m all endgamed out. It’s too much constant moving, constant going, always charging forward, rarely stopping to rest, and I always feel like I’m behind. I haven’t played FFXI just to play FFXI in a while, but I know there are so many things I just can not do without a big group. It makes me want to quit… The frustrating thing is that this is a game, yet not a game. I can’t believe I can worry so much about something that’s supposed to be fun!

It seems like time passes so quickly and yet, so slowly. I don’t know whether it’s because of Olivia’s complaints of boredom or because I miss Branden, my friends, FFXI and faster internet, but I feel like July 13th isn’t approaching as quickly as I thought it would. Yet, every time I make a new blog post, rather than one or two days passing, the week is already over and I’m not quite sure how that’s happening when my days seem to be infinitely long (not really in a bad way). On the other hand, I feel as if the beginning of this month had just passed, but it will soon be coming to a close.

Olivia downloaded an SNES emulator and we’ve been playing Chrono Trigger on her mac for the last three days. We’ve already had to fight Lavos 3 times today. The first time, she beat the game, but we didn’t get the ending we’d expected. After reading a guide online, I realized that we hadn’t won any cats from Norstein Bekkler’s tent, so we returned to our last save and I proceeded to win us some new kitties! I got 6 in all, lol. But, once the game ended, we still couldn’t play New Game +, so another internet search told us we had to beat Lavos through the Black Omen. Right now, we’re watching the final cutscene for the third time (yey~). I don’t really know what we’ll do after that.

We also started watching this series I’ve been trying to torrent for the last 4 days called Arrested Development. We’re only up to episode 4, but it’s pretty funny. I think the humor is similar to that of The Office, so if you like that show, you might want to check it out. It’s a 9 gig file and it’s been downloading at a steady 10 kb/s with the internet automatically disconnecting every 2 hours (yay again). Sometimes, the download is so slow, it gets into the bytes/second and then Vuze predicts the download will take approximately 3 years, lmao.

Shortly after Olivia got here, she, my dad and I went to a large foreign literature book store in Shanghai. It had four floors, and she was looking for some Kurt Vonnegut books, which were on the fourth floor. The fourth floor also happened to have a corner for Japanese literature, such as cookbooks and magazines. While I was browsing, I happened to pick up a copy of June’s Lala magazine, which included Kaichou wa Maid-Sama!, a series I’m currently pretty obsessed with. They also had July’s issue. :D When I get the chance, I’m going to try to read them, lol. I also picked up an artbook for Kobato. and a series that I’d seen on bn.com. The name escapes me right now, but it’s something like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Anyway… it’s late and I should get to bed.

Sorry for the late update. So last Wednesday, my sister was supposed to arrive in Shanghai on the 8:00PM flight from Beijing Airport. Her flight was the same as mine, but her Chinese vocabulary is limited and we wouldn’t be able to reach her while she was in transit, so I’d been worried. When we checked online, the airport reported that her flight was cancelled! But if her plane had been cancelled, she’d be stuck in San Francisco because Branden had confirmed he’d dropped her off at the airport. My dad did a different search and found that the flight had in fact taken off and her flight from Beijing was still scheduled to come in, so we watched an episode of Bones before driving to the Pudong International Airport, which is about an hour’s drive from our home. We were about 15 minutes early when we got there, so we sat around. My dad said it usually takes half an hour for people to come out of the airport from landing because they have to get their carry-ons, deplane, go through immigration, get luggage and go through customs. At the half hour mark, we waited by the meet and greet area, and though we waited for half an hour, we didn’t see her. We started to get concerned when we saw passengers and the flight attendants from a later flight. My dad asked information if the plane had, in fact, landed. They told him to go to the third floor and ask the people at China Air’s check in counter. He did so. They confirmed that the plane had landed, that my sister, Olivia, was on the plane and they even went so far as to tell us exactly which seat she was in. We went back downstairs and waited in front of international. My dad checked the domestic side since a transfer from Beijing to Shanghai would require transferring from the international to the domestic terminal. International flights still usually come out of the international terminal because that is where their luggage (checked in Reno) is processed. An hour and a half after her plane reported landing, my dad asked the people at the information counter if they could go look for her. They said they couldn’t. I asked if they could page her, which they said they could, but when they called the number for a page, nobody picked up. After some more waiting, we asked the guard standing by the security gate if he could ask security beyond the gate if they saw a lost young girl, maybe stuck in customs or something. They checked and said there was nobody near the luggage carriage for that flight and nobody was stuck in customs. They also recommended that we talk to the people at the China Air counter on the third floor. We waited at the gate until they locked it, when they told us there was nobody left inside. My dad went back upstairs again to confirm that she had been on the plane and they told him oops, she wasn’t. The flight out of san francisco had been delayed for four hours, so they said the people on that flight had been checked in to a hotel, which they gave us the number for. We called the hotel as we left the airport, asking them to confirm her presence. They said that all the passengers from that flight, 150 of them, had just walked in the door and they had only begun sorting out their rooms. They asked us to call back in an hour. Since the drive back home was about an hour, we agreed. When we were almost home, we called them back and despite their searching, they couldn’t find an Olivia Hu in their guest list. My dad said that since they were staying two to a room, maybe they couldn’t find her because they’d only gotten her roommates information and not hers.

We woke up the next morning to a call from my mom, who’s currently in Australia visiting her family. She said Olivia had called her and Alex (one of Olivia’s best friends) from a payphone in Beijing. Olivia didn’t have my dad’s number, she couldn’t reach my number and she was stuck in the airport. My dad called Alex, leaving his number and when Olivia called Alex back, she was able to reach us. My dad has a friend in Beijing, whom he asked to go to the airport, find her and send her on an airplane to Shanghai. Apparently, what had happened was Olivia’s flight, being delayed four hours, arrived at 8:37. Since there were only 3 passengers transfering to Shanghai and there was a full 747 waiting to take off on time, the plane left at 8:00. The other two passengers transfered to a flight in the domestic terminal to the Shanghai Hongqiao domestic airport, which is only 15 minutes away, and they “lost” the other passenger. When Olivia went to the counter, they told her that she didn’t have a ticket. I’m sure this is mental retardation on their part because they probably put her on the plane to Shanghai at 8 (hence why the guy in Shanghai even knew her seat number) and then when she went to check in half an hour later she had no ticket because it had already been “used.” They looked at her itinerary, which was in English, and when they saw “AR SHANGHAI TERMINAL 2″, they sent her to Shanghai Airlines in Terminal 2 when in reality, that reads “Arrive in Shanghai; Terminal 2.” Shanghai Airlines obviously had no record of her ticket because we hadn’t booked tickets with them, so she just asked for a ticket to Shanghai. They said it would cost $160, but she only had $142. Her cards were all rejected because she hadn’t notified any of her banks that she would be using them outside of the country, and usually using a card internationally requires some kind of confirmation. Unable to do anything else, she asked if she could use the phone and the guard told her that the phone booth would be open at 6am. Phones in China only take phone cards and though the booth itself was open, the person who sold them didn’t work until 6am. It was just after midnight, so she had to spend the entire night in the airport. When the booth opened and she got her card, she proceeded to call our mom’s cell phone and her friend Alex. Of course, Alex didn’t know our number, but he was the most likely to be awake. Australia is one hour behind Shanghai, so while it was 8am here, it was 7am there while it was only 5pm on the Pacific west.

Once we were able to get in contact with each other, my dad’s friend found her and got her on a plane to the domestic terminal in about an hour. Obviously for free. I recommend never taking China Air. They have a terrible track record, despite their low pricing.

Although I don’t have much time to talk about it now, I will elaborate later. Basically, they lost my sister.