all's well that ends well

So, we have now been in Qingdao for 1 1/2 days, and are finally getting more settled. Having our luggage back helps enormously, of course. As some of you know, we arrived in Qingdao with only 1 out of 4 bags, the others having mysteriously disappeared. My biggest fear was that because we didn't go directly to the luggage claim in Beijing (thinking erroneously that our luggage had been checked through) the Beijing airport personnel had confiscated our luggage and dumped it in some pit and we would never get it back. As it was, when we got to the carousel, it was empty and some airport man was wheeling off with a bunch of suitcases. We ran over and got one piece of luggage. The man said that there was no more, although I wasn't sure if there was a communication breakdown or not, given my rusty and jetlagged Chinese. I went to the lost luggage area and managed to communicate our situation, and the woman told us just to go to Qingdao and not worry about it. Of course, we couldn't help but worry when we arrived in Qingdao with no luggage. As it turns out, our luggage was actually still hanging around in Vancouver BC, where it decided to spend an extra day among the pine trees of the Pacific NW, and we managed to get it back last night. Not of course, with no hassle, as I managed to forget the luggage receipts, after being told repeatedly that what we needed to reclaim the luggage was the receipts, and after I spent much time making sure that I had put them in my purse. Sometimes you can't help feeling like a complete idiot. About half an hour of wheedling and pleading with some surprisingly sympathetic airport bureaucrats, we managed to get the suitcases after promising to fax the receipts the next morning (today).