Day 93 (7 September): Flying Home

I took an early taxi to the Beijing airport and made my way through immigration/customs where I received the last stamp of the trip on my passport putting it two stamps shy of being full. I then waited for my flight which departed and arrived on-time putting me back in San Francisco several hours on the same day before I left Beijing (thanks to the cool little trick of crossing the international date line.)

Observations:
1) Longest lines to leave a country yet. I spend two full hours in immigration lines to leave Beijing.
2) Renminbi conversion. I didn’t have receipts from converting dollars into RMB at the airport so to convert the Chinese currency back to USD I had to go through the black market which isn’t hard to find since the black-market money-changers wait by the official counters and charge almost the identical rate. In fact, some other people I saw avoiding the real currency counter line since the black market one was faster.
3) Fat people. This is always the first thing I notice when I come back to the US and the same was true this time.