Dasvidanya Kazakhstan............ Ni Hao Beijing!!!! 19.08.12

Wow, what a fun day this was....we woke up, had breakfast packed our bags as tight as possible and went downstairs and waited for our driver. He came at 2:30pm and we headed out to the airport, when we arrived our flight had been pushed back an hour which meant that we wouldn't be able to make our connecting flight from Abu Dhabi to Beijing. The supervisor talked to us and gave us the alternative to hang around Almaty airport until 11pm and catch a direct flight to Beijing that only took 4 hours, we were fine with that and went to check in. Once at the check in desk guest the supervisor suddenly changed his mind and said that we could catch our original flight and make the connection as the times had changed. He tagged our bags as priority connecting flight and off they went leaving us with 30min before the plane took off. We skimmed through duty free getting a couple of bits and pieces using our last Tenghe as we couldn't use it anywhere else.
We got to Abu Dhabi and raced through the airport until we reached our second flight, last call was announced and we were the last ones on the plane. Seven hours later we reached Beijing to find......no bags......crap.
I already had the feeling that their was no way the bags could have made it from one plane to the other if we had to sprint not to miss it. One random note Beijing airport is HUUUGE!!!! We had to take a train from the arrivals to the baggage collection point and it was not a short trip, a good 5 minutes by train inside an airport is a long time.
The lovely Mel met us at the airport once we had finished filling in the details of our missing bags and we headed to their place to freshen up after a yelling match with a 'farm boy' taxi driver and headed to the markets to buy some fresh undies and other essentials to last us at least a day.
Mel made up this feast for lunch and I had not slept a wink on the overnight flight from hell so I was just about to keel over, I was in the mindset of deal with it now sleep later, I'm definately glad I didn't nap or I would have not been a happy camper for the next part.
Mel and Scott have twins a boy and a girl, now the chinese love twins double happines double luck or something like that. Imagine walking into a market with two sets of twins with people poking and proding and taking photos and crowding around whilst we were attempting to quickly buy the essentials and of course some non esssentials before 7pm for dinner.
We finished up close to 7pm and rushed back to change and re-freshen up due to the humidity,  and headed to dinner at a nice little place which had the most amazing duck pancakes.......yummy!!!!
After we finished eating we stayed and chatted, Scott joined us and the twins were fast asleep in the double pram. We headed back and put on House of Flying Daggers before pretty much passing out to sleep.