From Beijing to Guangzhou

By the time we deplaned at Beijing, we had only about an hour and 45 minutes until our flight to Guangzhou. It was a bit hurried and confusing, as the airline employee in STL had told us our bags were checked all of the way through and we needed to do nothing further.  The China Air employee at LAX told us that we had to still claim our bags in Beijing and re-check them through customs.  When landing in Beijing, we had to present our passports to customs to get them stamps and officially enter the country.  We asked that individual about our bags, and she said that we did not need to do anything with our bags.

That still left a bad taste in our mouths though, because we had been given conflicting information and we didn't want to end up in Guangzhou with no luggage.  We went to baggage claim and asked the customs person inspecting the bags.  She told us we had to get our bags and re-check them.  Thank goodness we asked, because sure enough our bags were going around on the carousel in Beijing.  They'd probably still be there if we hadn't asked.  We got those through customs and re-checked.  Then we went through China's security, which works quite a bit like our own TSA, but the layout of this checkpoint seemed a bit discombobulated.

After all of that, there was very little time that we had to wait before boarding our Guangzhou plane.  To board it, we had to take a shuttle bus from the gate.  This plane was a Boeing 777-200 and it had two seats on each side, and five in the middle.  We didn't have our own screens, but there was a big screen in the front center.  It was pretty cool, as they had a camera apparently mounted on the front of the plane that displayed the runway.  We were able to see takeoff, some of the flight, and the landing as the captain would see it.  That flight left and arrived a bit late, too.  As this was our last plane ride to get here, we didn't really mind all of that.  We were just happy to be there safely after our final 3 hour flight.