The service on the Air Canada flight was terrible and one of the worst I've experienced in my life.  Twice I was passed up and ignored for food on a 12.5 hour flight.  I had to resort to backup sandwiches and chocolate pieces that my wife and I were smart enough to buy in advance.  The only thing the snarky flight attendants offered was a small glass of diet coke and this was after being 'greeted' mid-flight with just one word  "Anything?"

Such terrible service was to be expected but still infuriating when you're paying over $4000 for these flight tickets.   Let's just make it simple, I'll never fly with them again.  While Air Canda has a monopoly on the direct Shanghai-Vancouver route and likely will for quite some time, there are other options.  You can always transfer in Japan, Korea, or Hong Kong.

Amazingly they served  food on the last part of the flight but was still extremely fatigued, hungry, and in an overall terrible mental state on arrival.  It was a completely packed, 100% full flight.

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Oh well look at it this way, there was no quarantine on arrival.  I guess waiting 90 minutes for baggage was better than staying three weeks in a hotel.

We  decided there was no rush.  In our mental state from all that stressful travel, it made a lot more sense to sit down, grab a coffee and food, and then relax in the airport.

We then found a taxi which wasn't hard and loaded all the luggage including the bike.    

The driver turned the final corner and entered the gates of the compound.  Here we were back, home sweet home, and full circle to the place we had spent so many weeks in lockdown.  With our luck they would just lock the gates again.  

After hauling luggage up multiple flights of stairs I was beyond exhausted.  I somehow managed to put everything away and have a shower after such a long exhausting stint of travel.  And then I crashed.

When I woke up, my wife was nowhere to be found.  Did she actually go straight to work right after getting off the plane?  I couldn't believe that was even possible, but sure enough she did.

Next I wanted to sort out my luggage and other stuff.  I then went into a total panic when I realized my wallet was missing.  That wallet contained everything valuable we had worked so hard to acquire during the trip including all the credit cards, bank cards, drivers licenses, and even the passport.  To lose that would be unthinkable.  And yet of course it would happen now.  After all that entire month of being extra careful and cautious to protect everything valuable, the most important thing goes missing on the last leg of the journey from the airport home.

The next few hours were spent scrambling all over the house looking for the misplaced wallet.  At that point I just hated myself and wanted to blame anyone and everyone I could but there was no point.  This was just a nasty combination of all the trip stress adding up and how a mental breakdown is prone to happen after these long excruciating periods of travel. Arguably much worse than pre-covid because now the journey comforts have all gone out the window.

Still there was one thing I could do here:  go for a massage at a reasonable price.  As per my tradition whenever coming back from a long journey I started it off with a simple one hour body massage for the lowest price on the menu.  In this case it was only $25.  Now that sure beats the $120 an hour I had seen frequently in the US.

During that time I could calm down and mentally review everything that happened in detail since getting off the plane.  In this way I could get more and more clues as to where the wallet might be.   While trying to do a conscsious review, I realized we do so much of life on autopilot.  It takes real conscious effort to recall what happened in the last half a day, never mind in weeks.

This is where I realized how correct James Clear is in his book "Atomic Habits".  Our habits can work for or against us.

After almost an hour of feeling better I did ascertain the following happened:

1.  I used my passport to go through immigration

2.  The passport was put back in the wallet before the baggage claim gongshow and not taken out again

3.  I used my phone to pay for Starbucks and food at the airport not the wallet.  Since China is a cashless society, this is what you do.  But during the trip in Canada and the US for a month I used the wallet because those countries all needed credit cards, debit cards, or cash. So I figured that the wallet was not lost in the airport.  I even called the airport to confirm this. 

4.  The taxi was paid with the phone as well.  

Conclusion:  the wallet had to be in the house.  Sure enough it was found shortly after the massage and was a huge sigh of relief.  From that point on I had to celebrate.

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