Airport Woes!

So here we are in Bejing awaiting the plane to seattle....and nothing is ever simple. We left our hotel at noon yesterday and the only day in sometime it happened to be raining, cold and windy. Undettered we headed towards the airport stopping off at the "Giant" bicycle store to pick up 2 boxes. Stan was able to bend them in half and tie them onto his rear carrier. The ride the rest of the way was fortuantely uneventful except for one man that Stan almost took out with his wide load. At the airport we spent a few horus packaging up the bikes and gear. Much to our dismay Stan said "where are the bike boxes?" The empty boxes that were with all of our stuff and ourselves had just vaporized..gone!! I had what they call a kinipshin? or something like that and of course "no one" speaks English. We had suspected the house cleaning staff had whisked them away. After much wailing , arm flapping, workers trying to get us to buy the small boxes that they had we were able to flag down someone that spoke english. A young man from Singapore and his chinese friend were able to help figure out where they were. They were found in the room across from us, hidden in the back even though I had gone in there and asked for the boxes. Airport Check in at Urumqi, another painful episode. The guy at the counter was clueless about bikes, didn't speak English etc. Annoyingly there are the ones that do speak English and instead of taking over and solving dilemmas they dont really seem to do anything. He wanted us to have our boxes repackaged??? We are not sure why but basically refused. Stan had only spent he past 1-2hrs packaging them. Next, instead of our bags being checked through to Seattle they were only checked to Bejing and we got dinged 100 dollars apiece for the bikes. Bejing wasnt much better, thought he english had improved. We spent a whole hour at the ticket counter as Delta had us flying to Vancouver, not seattle , then they couldnt get my passport numbers to work, and then they said we could only check one piece of luggage(though it was 2) and then and then and then! They also dinged us for 150 dollars apiece for the bikes. Supposedly these were partner airlines and the tickets were purchased as one ticket...but no use arguing about it in Bejing. Finally we got on the plane and off to Seattle....America here we come. Digen(goodbye ) China.