Wednesday night I slept at Coach's so we could get an early start the next morning together. I was so appreciative that he suggested that because if not I would have had to wake up much earlier than I did having called a van-taxi in advance, for my original plan was to wake up at 4:30am and take my stuff out to the street and wait for a taxi to pick me up.
Anyway, we woke up at 5:30am and left the house around 6am. I wanted to get to the airport 3 hours early because a) that's what the airlines suggests for an international flight and b) we had bikes and I know sometimes things can go wrong with that. However, once we got there, the airlines weren't even checking bags yet, so we just went to have breakfast. After breakfast, we checked our bags (the guy at the counter let us put on our bikes with no extra charge - some people have such big hearts), got our tickets, and waited around for a while.
The plane to Shanghai was an interesting ride. Newspapers in Korean and English were available for reading, so I read my first Korean newspaper (in English) and was pleasantly surprised at how interesting it was. I just might start reading more! Also, on board, they were playing this "American Home Videos" type of video with funny bloopers-type thing, which was great because that was the first time since I have been to Korea that I have laughed uncontrollably around Coach (and pretty much anyone else except one time with Liz and her brother when he came to visit). We both got to see a different side of each other by watching this video. It was awesome. I'm a little immature, I know it, but its ok. It canmake life more interesting.
Upon arriving at Shanghai, we had about 8 hours until our flight to Hainan because of an awesome schedule change (that I had known about for a few weeks but still), so Coach suggested that we take a bus into town and get some food. I was all about trying it, although I was a little nervous because neither of us spoke Chinese, and for the first 30 minutes of trying to get a taxi at the airport our efforts proved fruitless because the Chinese taxi drivers would just drive away from us when we spoke English to them. Hahaha. However, when we were still trying to get taxi drivers to pick us up, we had to have a strategy on how to get back to the airport, because literally the only Chinese we knew was "Hello" and "Thankyou" (at least that is all I knew, he might have known a bit more, but not enough to get us back to the airport), so I took a picture of where we wanted to get dropped off and we were going to show the taxi driver the picture. Hahaha.
Anyway, finally we went to information and a woman gave us some good information on how to get a bus into Shanghai. Keep in mind that we have limited funds because checking baggage at the airport (we had to pick up our baggage after the first flight and stow it at the airport) was much more expensive that I had thought so a large portion of my Chinese money went towards that.
So we finally found the bus to the People's Square and went downtown. It was about an hour bus ride, so when we got there, we walked around for a bit, took some pictures, ate some food, and had to head back, since we wasted so much time at the airport trying to get a taxi and also getting lost when trying to find the bus terminal.
This is what we saw in the meantime.
Also I'd like to show you what we ate in Shanghai. It was very interesting, and I thought it tasted ok. It was an interesting taste, if nothing else. I mean I really didn't mind it at the time. Coach wasn't a fan at all. But later that day, we became more hostile towards Shanghai food, and even more so on Friday. Shame on me for eating foreign food a few days before a race! I think it was just the foreign nature of the sauces that got to me, and maybe to Coach too. But thankfully by Saturday night we were pretty much back to normal again, and I will comment about that more later.
It took us a while to find the correct bus back to the airport, but luckily we found someone who spoke some English to help us out. I really can't believe that we took a trip an hour away from the airport in a country where we basically spoke none of the language. If it weren't for Coach, I would not have been blessed with such an adventure. On the way back, he made a comment that "Experience is the best education, but it's very expensive." Hahaha. I thought that was great. And it is so true.
But we got back to the airport in time, with pretty much no extra cash. We almost couldn't make bus fare. Haha. Oh man. I'm sure we would have figured something out, but it was a great adventure nonetheless.
Time to go to school now, but I will continue more later!
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