In the plane
Travelling long distances is hard for children, so therefore we started to train or guide our daughter few months earlier for the trip: how to behave in a plane and in the airport. This would be Amelia's first flight. We watched pictures of airplanes and told stories about how airplanes work and about our earlier vacations so she could get a clear image of what is coming. We told about the security checks and how the bags are placed and fetched from … We asked our relatives also to tell stories about their vacations and to ask questions from her about travelling.

Our effort paid the prize. We left from Jyväskylä to 7.20 train to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, we were all excited and tired, Amelia was thrilled! Teemu´s mom waved us goodbye as we left. At the airport we checked our luggage and got some food. Especially Amelia was anxious to get to the plane already. Our flight to Istanbul took 4 hours, Teemu took a video about Amelia´s first takeoff!

In Istanbul it was about 30 degrees and we had almost 7hours of waiting ahead of us. We had two blankets and warm clothes for the few hour sleep. Flight terminals can be cold. Amelia spent the time mostly by running the horizontal escalators and sleeping. Although it was a little scary at times how the Turkish people got close to us and wanted to hug Amelia. It was amazing how well Amelia´s travelling boot camp worked, she did everything correctly just like we had taught her!

Then began the 10 hour flight to GuangZhou. The flight went as perfect as it can go. We had nice service (+ free drinks), on flight chef, many many new movies to kill time with, and even an electronic Sudoku game. Every passenger had their own touchscreen to play games or to watch movies. A little extra budget on a top-class flight will ease the sitting experience. Our daughter had the time of her life almost the whole trip and a full-night sleep on top of that. And against all odds we got the whole 4-seat row, since there was no-one sitting next to us, so we all got to sleep good 6-hour sleep. We truly can recommend Turkish Airlines for families. When Teemu started to explain to Amelia that we had travelled over 7000km from Finland, the answer was: Dad, I´m watching a movie now.

One good purchase for us was headphones for Amelia, ´cause the ones in the plane aren´t exactly for children, it was one of the best spent 50€ and she really enjoyed her Megamind movie on flight.

Hey! Almost forgot that during the flight you'll be given an arrival/departure card to fill up. It will be given to the officers at China boarders and won't take but a minute to finish.