Welcome Aboard

We had a 3 p.m. flight to *Guangzhou* yesterday so our guide, Queenie, was to pick us up at 1 p.m., and we were so ready to move on, but then the phone rang, and Tom made the mistake of answering it.  3 p.m. was now 7 p.m., and we had to be out of our hotel room by 2.  We stored our luggage with the bellperson, although that makes it seem like there was a regularly assigned bellperson when there really wasn't, so I'll change that to a guy in a small hat came and got our bags and put them in a closet in the lobby.  That left us with two backpacks, one filled with all the important papers we are not willing to let out of our sight and the other with all the electronic devices we own except for our 50" TV.  We walked back to the shopping mall for one last lunch and to kill some time before Queenie, whose name, by the way, Tom thought was Weenie for the first 24 hours because he heard it for the first time in a loud airport after not sleeping for a 14 hour flight, 8 hour layover and one hour flight to the other side of the world, came to pick us up at 5 p.m.  She took us into the airport, got us checked in and hugged us goodbye at security.  Now we were on our own to suck down every last drop of secondhand smoke until our flight left.  At the airport in *Hefei* There is a constant barage of flight numbers and information, mostly cancellations and delays, being announced in Chinese and English, leaving you filled with dread that your number is going to be called, and then it was, but we missed everything that was said after 5225.  That left us with about 25 minutes of dread before seeing the sign read 5225 19:00.  Suddenly they were loading the plane, and I'm in the bathroom with Tenley trying to encourage her to get a move on.  When we got to the gate Tom said, "Don't you know what final boarding call means?"  But how can anyone make that out with the bombardment of information streaming through the ear canal.? I handed three boarding passes to the woman at the desk, and she started dealing money back to me telling me, "She child."  I looked at Tom in a what the? sort of way, and he told me they were paying us because the flight was late, and we only get half for Maryn because she is a child, which I know makes no sense to anyone who has ever been stuck in an airport, whether smoke filled or not, with a child.  Tenley was excited all day about the feiji (fay-gee = airplane), and she finally got a chance to experience it.  She did a great job getting her wings.  No fear through any of it, just a smile when she felt us lift off the ground and wide eyes when we bumped for the landing.  A seasoned traveler.  We arrived in *Guangzhou* and were met by another guy in a small hat from our hotel who delivered us safely to our destination.  We went to bed way too late considering we had to be in the lobby at 9:30 a.m. this morning, but at least the airline paid us to be tired.