Shanghai: Day One
March 20 – 21, 2015
Today is the day! It’s finally time to leave for Shanghai!
Ahead of me was the daunting prospect of the 13 hour flight that had to be endured before landing… And let me tell you, it was as miserable as I thought it would be, if not more so. Let me be the first to point out the obvious that a 13 hour plane ride and a cold do not go together so well. I was that obnoxious passenger who coughed for 13 hours straight.
13 hours is a lot of time to fill when you’re stuck in your seat. Luckily, I ended up with a row, a pair of two seats, to myself and I had a window seat! But to fill my time I read, did word puzzles, and watched four movies.
We departed out of SFO at 12:00 PM on March 20 and arrived in PVG, Pudong Airport in Shanghai, at about 4:00 PM on March 21. We got off the plane and made it smoothly through customs and found our suitcases, in my case a lime green suitcase, at the baggage claim. We were then greeted by Kevin Rice, one of the professors, outside of Terminal One. (We had to book our flights individually so our class arrived on four different planes at four different times.) We then trekked over to Terminal Two to wait outside of Starbucks for the rest of the group for the remaining two hours until we would depart for the hotel.
While waiting a group of us walked around the terminal and some people found their first meal in Shanghai at KFC. Seems a little silly to me, but I suppose I had a protein bar for dinner so I’m not really one to talk haha.
Finally the whole group arrived and we loaded up onto a bus to head over to Ocean Hotel in Shanghai where we are staying for the week. The drive was about an hour long, but we could to meet our tour guide, Thomas a Shanghai native who lives in Pudong, and we got to see a little bit of Shanghai on our drive. The trees alongside the road were illuminated with a variety of colorful lights, one street had green lights in the trees and large dripping icicle lights it was really interesting to see.
We got to the hotel and unloaded from the bus and made our way, one elevator at a time, up to our rooms. The rooms have two twin beds, a lot of mirrors, and a really weird window between the bedroom and the bathroom (WTF?), luckily there is a curtain to pull down so that Victoria and I don’t have to watch each other shower haha.
We got settled in for a couple hours and headed out to MYNT, a club in the Bund, to celebrate Gorski and Ross’s 20th birthdays. They both celebrated their 20th birthdays with a nice, long 13 hour flight haha. We met people from Germany, Paris, and Shanghai and had fun dancing for a few hours before calling it a night.
By the time I made it to bed, I had been awake 27 hours straight (EEK!) and the hotel bed welcomed me with open arms.
I’ll add pictures soon!
Keep checking back for daily posts on my trip to Shanghai!
xoxo J