well, i'm back in new york! i would've updated during my last week in beijing, but there really wasn't much to report. i said goodbye to all my friends, and bought an L word dvd 9. i found out that the people i was going to do the back door of tibet with saw a sky burial, and was terribly jealous. well, sort of jealous. a sky burial is the funeral held by tibetan peoples, which involves having the body eaten by eagles, the idea being that they are being carried to heaven. wild. they said it was pretty cool to see. ah well, who says i won't see that in ny?
my flight home started well. it was a 3 o'clock flight, which meant that i had plenty of time to prepare my tuna fish sandwiches. when i got on the flight i discovered, joy of joys, that they had installed personal on demand tvs! this meant that instead of sleeping for the whole flight, i watched chocolat, no reservations, evening, and probably some other things i forget. toward the end of the flight, as it approached 3 in the morning, i realized that might have been a mistake.
i had to pick up my baggage and go through us customs in toronto (yes, apparently they have it there) and i was very nervous about my large dvd collection, and whether i'd have to do some fast talking to get them to let me keep it. as i waited for my luggage though, i discovered that i had another challenge. one of my two bags, the big one, did not show up. i waited as the remaining hour before my flight to ny ticked away, and finally the people there were like, oh well i guess you should just go. not losing my cool during this period, around 5 in the morning, was very difficult. but i am proud to say, not a single tear. the airline industry will get no more tears from me!
i would like to point out that this means that for me, air canada has a 100 percent bag loss rate. i guess if i felt like being generous, i could say they had a 66 percent bag loss rate, as one of my bags made it through fine yesterday. but screw that. come on air canada, the personal tvs do not make up for losing my bag! i'm going to give them a day before i start calling to bug them, but i'm more optimistic this time, since last time they managed to get me my bag before my insurance would have granted me any money. though this time, i've got a lot more to lose. this was about half my stuff for the year. crap. i have seriously the worst luck. no one else on that transfer flight lost their stuff.
uh, i had a very talkative cab driver for the ride home, which was quite a joy as by now it was 8 o'clock in the morning my time and i had slept only about an hour on the flight from toronto to new york. he was a young guy, and kept talking about how people should take advantage of their opportunities. or something, i dunno. i got home, and was asleep by eight.