My First Plane Ride

I've never been on a real plane before, so when the prospect of travelling overseas for the first time in my 23 year life, I was excited! I was finally going to experience the mode of transportation that is flying, which to a young child may sound like a magical adventure but in reality is just a very long ride in a flying bus, with wings.

But I was excited about flying for the first time, but the thought of crashing or having something go wrong scared me, but statistics proved that I should remain excited, but my history with travel sickness then scared me, but that was years and years ago, so the excited was back and off we went, to fly to China and eventually Hong Kong on what was a 25 day holiday I like to call...Journey To The East.
Prior to going my dad got us a camera so we could capture the fun, in the form of a Nikon D5000 DLSR so that was exciting, but due to our lack of using good cameras the shots might not be so awesome. Gotta get into photography!
I also borrowed Rose's camera, so we had 2 cameras on our trip to play around with.




So on the 8th of January 2010, Friday morning, we flew to Guangzhou, China via China Southern airlines, as booked by my mum. I would've chosen something not made in China, but even counterfeit planes work, right...?


So this is us on the plane, I've dressed rather warmly, my brother has gone for a t-shirt and shorts combo in preparation for China's winter weather.
Eventually we took off and instead of sitting back in my seat I kept looking around at everything, out the windows and stuff. This move probably affected me a few hours later but nevertheless it was fun.
Our plane had headphone plugs, which my brother, sister and I quickly tried out, looking for music familiar to our ears (ie. english) and we found some, unfortunately everytime the captain or the plane talked, it'd blow up in our ears, piercing our ear drums, except for my brother, as he had an attachment to dim the sound, but only one, one for himself.
Being China Southern, everything was in Chinese, followed by Engrish, which is barely understandable so we're always relying on our parents when they announce something that sounds important.
The monitors had lots of chinese advertisements and they had a thing for airing episodes of Mr. Bean (the cartoon series) and everything just seemed low quality, even the movie!
The in-flight movie was Harry Potter and the strike of puberty or something, I tried to watch it but the constant turbulence announcements halted the movie and part way through I was tired and fell asleep, which is hard to do when you're 1.8 metres tall in economy with very, very little leg room and the person in front of you has decided to recline their seat back into you and while I could've reclined my seat also I felt I should be nice and not but I did sort of sleep, that half asleep sort of sleep. Nine and a half hours later we touch down in a bumpy landing which freaked me out because in my mind I didn't know if the plane would stop before the runway ran out or not (it did). Fortunately I didn't get sick on the plane, though part way through I thought I was going to get sick, but I just had to cool myself down and things were fine again. My sister on the other hand got sick a total of six times, the last time just as we landed too, I don't think flying is for her...

Probably the best thing about this holiday was the fact that we had nothing planned in the way of what we were going to do, just rough ideas about what we were going to do, as in go to China, visit our relatives home town, go to Hong Kong then return home. Everything inbetween was going to be worked out as we went along, and I had no problem with that.

Next up - Meet the Relatives

McPancakes before the flight, yum