Empty Nest Again

AF is off to Scotland and on to the next chapter in her life. This will be a new chapter for us as well (we had a little rehearsal this summer). The three of us left for St. Andrews to get her settled in to school and UK life with dorm, registering for classes, banking, phones, and all that fun stuff. She has "Freshers week" starting on September 22 and the official start of school is October 1.
She has been getting prepared for her move to Scotland by watching the 2007 Rugby World Cup. I have never seen her so interested in watching a sport on TV before. We even went to an Expat Pub in Beijing (the Pavilion) for dinner and drinks a couple of times to watch the games. It has been interesting.

The trip to Scotland was filled with adventure. First we went to check in at KLM with 4 large heavy bags which will be AF's belongings at St. Andrews. We presented our itinerary to the ticketing agent who then asked us for our paper tickets. Ooooops. We were pulled aside for some special processing until BF realized she had the paper tickets. We got back in line to discover a weight restriction on bags of 20Kg per passenger. I won't even tell you how much the overage cost was, ouch.

Next we got on the plane and were seated in a row that backed restricted our seats from reclining normally and it looked like they had crammed this seating in on the 747. We had very little space between the seats in front of us. I should have taken a picture. At least it was only a 9.5 hour ride.

We arrived at Amsterdam on time and lounged around for the next 3 hours while we waited to get on a short 1.5 hour ride to Edinburgh. We presented our boarding passes to get on the shuttle bus out to the plane. A ticketing agent got on the bus asking for passengers with our last name. "we need your paper tickets". BF fished out the paper tickets again for the agent.

We arrived at Edinburgh on time and had difficulty locating our driver to St. Andrews. We hunted and paged the driver but nothing. We had a reservation with contact information. I called on a pay phone but did not have any coins for the phone so I used the debit card (big $10/call mistake). I called the mobile phone number but it rang once and hung up. I tried the office number and it referred me to the mobile number. BF went to the information center and they placed the call for her. Turns out you have to call them as they are sitting in the parking lot. Uggh. We arrived at the hotel around 15 hours after the trip started from our apartment in Beijing.