The journey home was, expectedly, an ordeal. A 4am wakeup call, a bus ride to Shanghai airport with an inadequate boxed breakfast (plain yogurt, bun, water), an interminable wait at the vastly underutilized Beijing airport and a 14 hour flight to JFK. No joy here.
We flew over Siberia’s snowy desolate landscape, down through Canada’s tundra, over northern Quebec and, most likely, our beloved Chelsea to arrive at New York at 2 pm, technically a few hours after we left china.