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!
