the trip

i feel like my face is falling off. every time i go from the philippines to north american winter, my entire body cracks, peels, and falls off, much like when a snake sheds its skin. from the 80 degrees and 100% humidity of manila to the 15 very dry degrees of michigan...

we left on a bad note. the local airlines in the philippines are trying to be modern and use e-ticketing, but it's not really working. we had had tickets to hong kong booked with cebu pacific for over a year now. they have just started using e-tickets, so we were figuring we would be ok without paper tickets. how wrong we were. at the check-in counter we gave our passports and they found us on the flight list. all good? no. we were then asked to show our paper tickets.

"paper tickets?"

"yes sir. we need to need to see your paper ticket."

"but we have e-tickets. we should be in the computer."

"yes sir, you have e-tickets. but i need to see your paper tickets."

"but e-ticket means there is no paper ticket..."

this went on for twenty minutes at the counter, then another forty minutes at the cebu pacific business office, where the three girls called everyone they knew before concluding that we would not be allowed on the filght without paper tickets.

argh.

so we ended up spending abother $460 on tickets that we already had so we could get ourselves out of the philippines.

we checked in fine with our e-tickets in hong kong...

things got better after that. 24 hours of flights and 13 hours in airports in between and zeb was great the entire time. he was definitely not the stereotypical screaming kid on the plane. he was happy and made friends with his seatmates and the flight attendants. actually, due to my typical end-of-semester sickness, he was in a better mood than i was.

updates later.