Scott's China Trip - Part 2: Long flights, Small treats, Big Ripoffs, and Misunderstandings

Having traveled a lot for work with my three years of visiting El Paso with my dad, I had learned to pack fairly lightly and get by with not very much in the way of luggage. So despite going on a week-long trip to China, I fit everything into a small carryon and a mostly empty backpack (it mostly just held my laptop and the samples I had ordered off of Amazon of products I was interested in sourcing and selling myself). I flew from Boise to Seattle without incident and then had a three hour layover to tangle with. My friend Walker—who had traveled to China a few times himself—told me the food on the Chinese airlines is pretty good, but I still figured I’d need to get something to eat in case the flight food didn’t agree with me. After finishing a pretty darn good breakfast burrito from Qdoba (or something like that) I found a lonely Egg McMuffin, still in its wrapper, abandoned and alone on a charging table near where I sat down to watch the news while waiting for my flight. After a few minutes of looking around, waiting for someone to come and claim it, I decided to give it a good home. I spent the next hour or so of my wanderings about the airport casually looking for a microwave somewhere to reheat it, but to no avail. I ended up eating it cold but told myself it was supposed to taste that way and it ended up being quite good.

Before I boarded my flight I sent a text message to Matt and Mike that I was boarding the plane and would look forward to meeting up with them in Shanghai. I told them that I had book myself a hotel room at the airport Ramada since I hadn’t made prior reservations due to the whole visa fiasco. Just as I was boarding they wrote back that they had already booked and paid for a room for me with the rest of the group at the Double Tree. For the next several minutes I was frantically trying to cancel my reservation on my phone, but all of the links in the e-mail that said “Cancel reservation” or “Change reservation” just sent me to the home page for the hotel and tried to sell me another room. On top of that I was now on the plane seated in the exit row directly across from the flight attendant. She told me repeatedly that I needed to put my phone away. I would turn it off and put it in my pocket and then when she left to check seat belts or something I was frantically back trying to save myself the $150 I was going to lose if I couldn’t cancel this reservation before takeoff. I finally had a brilliant idea and texted Mitzi to ask her to cancel my reservation since I was going to lose connectivity in a matter of minutes and was having no luck. I barely got the text off and forwarded the e-mail when we took off and I lost connection.

For the first hour or so I was stressing about whether or not Mitzi would be able to figure out how to compete the cancellation. Then I decided there was nothing I could do worrying about it other than make an already long flight longer so I put it out of my mind and tried to get comfortable. The food on the flight was pretty darn good, and the plane was quite nice. I sat next to a Chinese mother and daughter who both slept almost the entire flight, an accomplishment of which I was envious. I tried to sleep in various uncomfortable positions but with little success. If I craned my neck backwards I was able to see out the window and, to my surprise, noticed that after four hours in the air I could still see land. Curious! It turns out our flight path basically had us tracing the West coast of Canada and the Aleutian Islands until we hit the East coast of Russia, Korea, and then China.

Because we were flying into the rotation of the Earth it was daylight for we on that flight for about 20+ hours straight, which was a little disorienting, although I really didn’t feel that tired until a few hours after landing. One odd thing I immediately noticed as we came in for landing in China was how brown the ocean water was. I’m not sure if that’s a result of the rivers carrying lots of sediment to the ocean near Shanghai or a pollution issue or what.  The next thing I noticed was that my phone didn’t work…at all. For some reason I thought I would be able to pick up some kind of cell phone signal and just have to pay roaming charges. Nope, not a blip of signal, nor was I able to access the airport wifi because it wanted to text me an access code, which I couldn’t get. Consequently, I found myself alone in China with potentially two hotel reservations and no means of communication to verify either. My flight also landed me in China about 5 hours before the bulk of the group would be showing up so I was on my own.

After waiting through what felt like a lot of different lines (passport check, customs, security, and maybe one other) I finally made it out of the airport. Waiting for us outside the gate were a mass of people offering transportation to our various destinations. One lady started yelling at me in English “Hotel? Hotel? Where you want go?” I told her I needed to get to the Hilton Double Tree and she came and grabbed my bag and said she would get me there. I told her I didn’t have any Chinese currency but only US dollars and my credit card. She said they would take a credit card and not to worry. Mike had said on one of the China intro videos that the best exchange rate for currency was actually at the Double Tree so I planned to change any money I needed there. The lady asked me 4 or 5 times to point out the exact hotel on the map so she was sure to send me to the right place. Then she charged me $700 Chinese Yuan on my credit card and sent me to wait for the cab. I wasn’t sure at that time but that seemed pretty steep, but I was just anxious to get to the hotel where so that I could meet up with the rest of the group when they arrived. It turns out that $700 Yuan translates to about $109! HOLY COW! Initially, I had toyed with the idea of walking to the hotel (I had packed lightly, after all, had 5 hours to kill, and thought it would be a fun way to get to know the “real” China by foot), but as the cab ride wore on I realized that the hotel was WAY farther away than I had anticipated. However, it was definitely NOT $109 far away. On top of that, before we even got to the hotel the cabby straight up told me to give him a tip, and even said “$20 USD is good.” Tired and resigned I just gave it to him.  I later found out that the cab ride for the rest of the group ran them $26 total, and Mike reminded me that he had warned everyone not to go with those tourist vultures in one of his videos (but it seems I forgot that part, to my dismay).

If I sound a little tired in this video it's because I was.

I arrived at the gorgeous and enormous Hilton Double Tree in Shanghai and went to check in. The used my passport to look up my reservation and…there was none. We tried different permutations of my name—W Scott, Will S, Will, Scott, W S, etc.—but continued to come up empty. I showed them the message from Matt about them having a room “bought and paid for” for me on my phone and they were able to verify that they had a reservation for Matt, so at least I knew I was in the right hotel and that as soon as they arrived we could sort everything out. In the mean time I asked them if I could just park myself on a couch in a corner of the enormous lobby for a few hours to wait for them, which they happily allowed me to do. Again, I tried to log in to their wifi but continued to be frustrated by the “text verification code” issue, and thus was unable to check if Mitzi had successfully cancelled my other hotel room or complete the process myself (and try to save the $150 room fee as some consolation for getting ripped so hard on my cab ride). I was also unable to communicate with Matt or Mike until they physically walked through the door to the hotel, whenever that was going to be. I did bump into a nice American tourist there for a business conference who tried to help me configure my phone to get some small amount of connectivity up and running, but to no avail. In the end, he very graciously allowed me to send Matt a text from his phone to let him know I’d arrived at the hotel but they had no reservation for me on file and that I would just be waiting in the lobby until they arrived.

Now I was starting to get tired, but I was worried the hotel staff would be forced to get after me if I fell asleep in the lobby, so I had to occupy myself. I ended up watching Edge of Tomorrow and 90% of The Bourne Identity on my backup phone over the next 3.5 hours until Mike and Matt walked through the door. I was exhausted. Everyone else in the group was introducing themselves to me, but by that point I’d been awake for almost 24 hours and was not going to remember much of anything at that point, so I asked them to kindly reintroduce themselves to me in the morning. Mike and I worked with the hotel staff to figure out what had happened with my reservation. After about 20 minutes of back-and-forth and confusion, Mike realized that he had mixed up two things in his mind: At the same time he was helping me get my visa sorted out, he was also booking a hotel room for another student that was flying in by himself (who he had confused with me). Funny enough, that student ended up falling asleep in the airport in Toronto during his layover and missed his flight to Shanghai! I ended up taking his room and, after all the hassle and at Mike’s request, the hotel staff actually hooked me up with a suite. The room was fantastic and with an amazing view of Shanghai’s central park. I took a long, hot bath (I love taking baths in hotels because they’re often the only bathtubs I can fit in) and then crashed. I was surprised to learn, however, that my hotel bed which looked so white, fluffy, and inviting, was about as hard as a box spring (like the one I slept on for the first two weeks of my mission as part of a prank by my roommates). The other hotel mattress was similar, leading me to conclude that standards of mattress softness in China are much different than they are in the US. Fortunately, I was tired enough that I slept through the night without trouble. I had made it!