Travel Tales #4: Stuck in Beijing For 3 Days

What is the longest delay you have ever had? 4 hours? 8 hours? How about three full days without money, knowledge of where you are, means of communicating with the outside world, and no local around who can understand you? In retrospect, I took one of my first travel crises quite well for a newbie traveler!

Let me paint the picture for you. The events depicted in my post “Getting Scammed in Xian” had a lot more going on than I led on so let me continue the story. After finally seeing the Terracotta Army, I went on with my trip to Lijiang and then Chengdu. When vacation time was over, I had to return to Korea, as I had just started my first year teaching English in the tiny town of Daejeon. There was one little thing that stood in the way though, a 5 hour layover in Beijing, one of the worse worst airports in the world. (Edit of typo: courtesy of Grammar Nazi Dave Yuhas) Read more