Moving day: my life-saving skills, chinese border patrol, and more

Where to begin...oh yeah, we moved to China yesterday. That was interesting.  Any guesses as to how many bags we brought? I'll give you a hint, we took a lot. The answer is 9 bags: 5 checked and 4 carry-on. And we were still tight on space. 3 of the 5 checked bags were EXACTLY 50 pounds, the others 48 and 49. Not bad for a bathroom scale. For those of you who are considering a foreign move, here's what you need to do. Corral all of your possessions in one room, rent a dumpster, and throw 75% of it away. It'll make things a WHOLE lot easier, I promise.

This is us in the Salt Lake airport at 5:30 am. Don't we look chipper for 4 hours of sleep ;)

We had a lovely flight from SLC to Detroit. Then a 3 hour layover, a 1 hour delay, and a 16 hour flight to Hong Kong. Eric and I were both in middle seats in adjacent rows but thankfully, Harman upgraded us to economy comfort which has significantly more leg room. It made the long flight bearable. Needless to say, it was a VERY LONG DAY.

On the plane, I got to respond to an emergency medical situation. It was nice to use my brain for the first time in a few months. Without going into too much detail, a gentleman on the flight found out the hard way that alcohol and Ambian don't play well together. So, I got to take a health history, monitor and treat a patient for a while, and get twenty-questioned by the entire flight crew. My favorite part of the situation: "Do you think we need to land the plane to care for this passenger?" I said no. He was fine. After my "save", I got the hero treatment for the rest of the flight. Apparently people don't always respond to medical emergencies ( I can't imagine why?) The flight crew brought me extra snacks from first class (wowee), passengers and crew from all over the plane came up to thank me, and I got $150 credit for a future flight! Not bad, huh. I promise, the situation wasn't all that dire though.

After we landed, our driver drove us to the China-Hong Kong border. Wow, border crossing was also fun. We waited at no fewer than 3 checkpoints for about an hour. We had several guards look at our passports/visas for a while. We also had to take all our luggage out of the van and run them through another x-ray machine. Thankfully, we didn't have to open them up, that would have been a NIGHTMARE (see paragraph 1).

Border checkpoint. There were at least a dozen lanes available for cars.

We're staying at the Venetian Hotel Shenzhen, it's a beautiful European-style hotel. Shenzhen is very beautiful city. There are a fair amount of skyscrapers and a ton of apartment buildings. It's very green with a ton of trees everywhere. The city is situated on the ocean, and it is very hot and humid. I have just a couple pictures, but I'll take more and post them and we get around the city.

View from our balcony.

You can see a tiny smidgen of ocean on the right.

The hotel room, Eric sleeping on the bed made of concrete.

This week is mostly about getting situated in the city. We're going apartment-hunting later in the week. Eric  will only be spending a short amount of time in the office. We'll keep you updated.