Woke up at 6 am, and got to the Seattle airport at 7 am.
Went to the american airlines counter and got told to go to alaska. Their terminals weren’t working, but after going through their attendant line, I got by ticket to los angeles. Since China Eastern isn’t their partner, they couldn’t reserve my seat for the rest of the journey.
I did get an exit row through, which was quite nice.
In los Anggeles, I had to exit the terminal completely, walk across the block to the international terminal, and re check in.
The flight was full, so I got a middle seat for the 14 hour trip over to shanghai. :-/
Luckily a family had the other three of middle block seats, and I switched to get an aisle. 14 hours was still a long time, but I managed to keep myself occupied.
near the end, the attendants came around with a meat thermometer and checked everyone’s temperature.
Then, when we got to the terminal, government officials dressed in full white hazmat suits and goggles showed up, and used beefier thermometers to scan everyone again. In the final section of passengers, a baby apparently had swine flu. They had the people directly around it fill out longer health forms, and we didn’t see the eventual resolution, since they let our section off before they were totally done. We did have to wait an hour on the plane while they got urine tests and such.
So that was fun.
Then the transfer to the plane to beijing was pretty chaotic, we went most of the way out in a group with stickers on our arms, and then cut through employee areas to get into a very understaffed transfer security check and eventually to the terminal.
Didn’t get a ton of sleep so far, we’ll see how I do on this next flight, I’m starting to get sleepy.
Hopefully my baggage has made it this far, I guess we’ll see when I get in to beijing.