Landing in Shanghai
I’ve landed in Shanghai! I am not going to make any promises about keeping regular updates, but I am keeping a journal of activities that I do while in China. I got this idea from one of Nomadic Matt’s posts recently on how he wished he had kept better travel notes.
I apologize for the lack of pictures at the moment. Hopefully I can post some in about 12 hours if the computers at the hostel have a SD card reader.
My flights to China had minor delays, but nothing major. Both Minneapolis and Detroit had some of their runways under construction. This caused longer than usual waits at Minneapolis to take off (at least we were first in line) and arriving the Detroit area, the plane was forced to circle for about 15 minutes before we were cleared to land. Bottom line was that I landed 5 minutes late in Detroit instead of 20 minutes early.
The international flight from Detroit to Shanghai was on a 747 and was extremely comfortable. I’m glad I used 120,000 frequent flyer miles to get myself a business class ticket. The seat was extremely comfortable and I could lay about 170 degrees flat. I’m not sure why many people at FlyerTalk.com complain about the NW/Delta seats, but I found no problems with them. Maybe its because I haven’t experienced international airlines business class and above seats. I was able to sleep around 5 hours of the 13 hour flight in part because the seat was very comfortable.
The other reasons I was excited for the flight is because the area of the plane I was sitting in was the upper deck. I even took a mini-tour of the cockpit of the 747 and took some pictures of that. One of the things that surprised me was that this flight was completely full in both classes of service. It’s unfortunate that Delta and other carriers are looking to retire the 747. It is such a storied plane.
When I was not sleeping on the aircraft, I caught up on movies. I find traveling to be a great excuse to catch up on movies I have been wanting to see. I watched X-men: Wolverine and Fast and Furious 3. X-men was great and I wished I had seen it in the theatre while Fast and Furious was OK, but there were no regrets about missing it in the theatre. I also watched Star Trek because I thought it was a really great movie the first time I saw it.
I also spent some time trying to review my Chinese. All I have to say is wow. People speak the language very quickly here and many times due to pronounciation and tone mistakes I make, it can be hard to communicate, but that is also part of the joy of traveling and learning a new language. More to come on that as the trip progresses.
Getting through customs and immigration was a breeze at Shanghai Pu-Dong Airport. I walked out of the secure area and met my Chinese instructor’s brother. We drove into the city, stopped at the hostel, and went out to dinner.
In my next post, I’ll discuss that dinner, my impressions of Shanghai and hopefully have some pictures.
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