The World's Best Xinjiang Diary Ever: Christmas Travels Numero Diez

Our flight check-in was at 2pm so we had a while to waste in the morning. We suddenly realised we hadn't really seen the West Lake properly; we'd seen the fountains at night and walked past it a couple of times, but not really walked round it (well partway round, it's pretty big). The main attraction in Hangzhou is the West Lake and it appears on the back of the 1 kuai note. We didn't realise this until Christmas when I was talking to Perry at Francesca's apartment and told him where we going next, and he mentioned this... fun fact : )
So it seemed like really we should go see! It was actually quite fun, we walked partway round, and the whole lakeside was filled with tourists and people on their day off with their families. I had some candy floss and we took photos on a pagoda part way out into the water. Liam really really doesn't like open water and was not intending to come out onto the pagoda, but being a big brave boy he did! Then got off again sharpish! There were pleasure boats out on the water, but we didn't really have time for that and Liam only gets on boats when absolutely necessary. Mostly we spent our time walking a bit, and taking the opportunity to try out practically every Chinapose we could think of. After one last Starbucks, we thought it best to get a taxi as soon as we could, keeping in mind the difficulty in getting one the day before. We managed to get one almost straight away though. We asked to go to a certain location where we knew we could get a shuttle bus to the airport, but he said he'd take us straight to the airport for 100kuai. The taxi fare to the placey would only come to 10 and the shuttle bus was 15 so we turned down his offer and were soon on a shuttle bus to the airport.
We checked in so early that we had ages to spend, but there were no seats in the airport. While Liam went outside to puff on a cancer stick, I sat down in a very comfortable-looking chair. Immediately a woman came over and said it was a massage chair and asked for 5 kuai for 5 minutes. I couldn't be bothered to argue so I just gave her the money. The massage was actually so so so so good! If a little painful. Liam and I then proceeded to spend a lot of time and money on the chairs - I think we made the woman's day!
We were flying via Xi'an. I was quite calm about getting there for New Year now; I had had the initial worry when we'd bought the flights, but now thought that perhaps I WAS being a pessimist and that of course we'd make it for New Year. Our plane took about five million years to turn around and began to taxi. Then mysteriously stopped dead. They opened the cabin door and everybody without delay switched their phones on. It was actually quite amusing to see everyone desperately texting away and instantly making calls and so on! You think people in the west are dependent on their phones? You should see the Chinese! Added to that, whenever we are on a flight, you start to hear people turn their phones on when we're making our final descent. I'm waiting for the computer and navigation systems to go skewiff and us to all plummet to our deaths because someone just couldn't wait that last ten minutes for a text message.
We waited on the runway for about 20 minutes. I'm not entirely sure as to what happened, but at the end a little passenger man came to the front and publicly apologised to everyone and then bowed in respect, which was quite sweet. So it was now even closer to missing midnight celebrations! Onwards the flight went. We got to Xi'an and there were no delays there so we got our connection and flew homewards.