The Story (part one)

I wanna tell you about the trip I had to Beijing, China, last April.

When I first found out that I'm going with only two other journalist (Kompas and BusinessWeek) in that trip held by HP, I was kind a... well, scared. First, I'm going not as a PCplus journalist, but representing Infokomputer instead. Second, the event is about printer, something that I know little about because I used to deal with mobile phones. Third, it was only my second event abroad. The first time was to Singapore invited by Motorola. There were six other journalist coming with me, and four of them was just like me--it's their first time going abroad. So it was a lot easier.

But, of course, I'll never let stupid reasons like that get in the way of me having the rare-chance experience of going to a country like China. So, I study a lot about printers to prepare myself, bought some thick outfit because i found out from the Internet that the weather there was about 11-17 degrees (Celsius), change my money to yuan, and... just be ready for the adventure. China, here I come! Something like that :p

We're going with my favorite airline so far (this statement was rather unfair, because I only flew with SQ and AirAsia before :p) and that is Singapore Airline or SQ. The flight was around 8 pm starting from Jakarta-Singapore, then Singapore-Beijing after about 2 hours waiting in Changi airport. I don't mind though, because this place looked more like a shopping mal than an airport. But even with SQ, flew at night time was uncomfortable. The food was good, but I'm not used to eat at 1 or 2 am so i didn't really enjoy it. And I barely can sleep either, because I kept waking up now and then.

But you know what, I found out later that sleeping is not that important, because in the morning when the plane finally arrived in Beijing airport (was that its name? Hmm, I'm not so sure), I felt fresh enough to start my trip in this country. And I carried this freshness with me all day long because this is our only free time. Tomorrow is an all-day-long session with HP, and it continued the next day but only until around 12 pm.