Flight Log

Summer of 2017.
To celebrate our graduation, some friends of mine planned a two-week vacation to the island nation of Sri Lanka, an island of various amazing sights.

There weren't many places to choose from in the middle of July, as most of South Asia were in their rainy season. The other alternatives under my consideration were South Africa and Central Europe. Well, we had difficulties finding accommodations in South Africa's Kruger National Park since its peak season, and flights to Central Europe were a little bit beyond our budget. So, my friends and I chose Sri Lanka which was closer to home, and July was just in between its two major rainy seasons.

At 24XX CNY (36X USD), the return flights to Sri Lanka by Malaysia Airlines were a bargain. The only disadvantages were that the connection time for our outbound trip were just 75 minutes, this plus the delay-prone Shanghai Pudong Airport (PVG) mean we were very likely to miss our connection. So to keep any potential delay, person or baggage from ruining our vacation, we opted to stay two nights in the town of Negombo by Colombo Airport (which was usually a short pit stop for most visitors to the nation). This wasn't too much of a problem, as any delay would be well covered by our insurances. And it turned out that this helped.

On the afternoon of May 9, my friend and I travelled on 5 trains for 5 hours covering 171.2 km and reached Tokyo Narita Airport from Gora, Hakone to conclude this eleven-day journey to Japan.

May 3rd, after spending three days in Osaka and its surrounding cities, we were heading for Tokyo.
So we arrived at Namba Station at 0855 in the morning to the airport bus to Itami Airport.

Chinese Labor Day Holiday in May, 2017. After discussions with my undergraduate classmates, we decided that this should be the time for our graduation trip, and we chose Japan as our destination.
During the reservation process, we found that All Nippon Airways (ANA) could offer us a relatively cheap Japan domestic legs in its return tickets, so we chose an itinerary of Beijing - Osaka - Tokyo - Beijing with ANA, the first leg of which is NH980 from Beijing to Osaka.

5 nights, some tourist sites, a few meetings with friends and countless Pokemons later, I was on my return trip to Beijing on April 10th.

In early April I accepted a university's campus visit invitation and visited Chicago area. Given that their 600 dollar allowance on travel, my only choice within that for return trip from Beijing to Chicago was China Eastern Airlines with connection at Shanghai Pudong.

Three days of Barcelona shall round off my four week's roaming the world, and it's about time I get back to school before the registration period ended for my last undergraduate semester.

After ten days in the mayhem of Morocco (well, I mean the Medina parts), my friend and I were more than eager to get back to the civilized world of Barcelona.

So on this last afternoon in Morocco, we booked a (grand) taxi from our hotel manager that took us to the airport for 150 Dirhams. The taxi would take us through the newly-developed regions of the city of Fes, which wasn't very much what we were used to seeing in Morocco.

Originally, when I was planning this trip to Europe, I was fascinated by photos showing majesty of imposing Sahara sand dunes and intricacy of century-old ancient city streets, that the North Africa country of Morocco presented to the world, which also recently exempted visas for Chinese visitors. But with Morocco being in North Africa, which was a totally different fare zone in the airline charts than Europe, I hadn't been able to find a satisfying price. Luckily, when I was searching connection opportunities through Europe, I bumped into the poorly-rated budget carrier Ryanair, which offered quite competitive rates for flights to/from the Moroccan cities of Marrakech and Fez.

So with Qatar Airways' offer of cheap flights to Spain, my friend and I decided to spend three days each in the two major Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona as "transitions" between home and Morocco.

And now that we had visited the city of Madrid and its neighboring towns of Toledo and Segovia, we headed for the airport for our flight to Africa.

With a luxurious 5-week winter holiday that could probably be my last, and with round-trip flights to Europe as low as 39XX CNY (It seemed that Qatar Airway’s year-round sale had never ended, and I was quite amazed to find such fares departing only three days from the Chinese New Year, and from my hometown Hangzhou), I planned another trip to Europe, with some good friend back to ninth grade.

Previously, I had 16 flights in and out of my home town's airport, all of which were domestic. Now, I could add its "international departure" to my achievements list.