Here I am!

Well!

My first time to write a blog: it is very strange to write without knowing who will read it. Anyway - no point dwelling on that!

Ta me anseo i Shanghai (albeit without fadas)! Itt vagyok Shanghai-ban! Here I am in rainy, puddley Shanghai, smiling and waving and thumbs-upping to Hailing's mother while our translator is out at her choir rehearsal. The clock is lying to me: the time I'm reading is definitely not the time I'm feeling.

My day began with hitting the road in rainy, puddley Budapest around 11.30 on Friday (today/yesterday..Jaj Istenem! Ni chreidim e! aggh!) and immediately 3 of the 7 little wheels of my new suitcase decided they didn't want to come, the little feckers. Rolled off before I even got as far as Nyugati. I put the escapees in my pocket and scraped and dragged along into the station, down the escamalators and onto the metro to Kobanya Kispest, getting the occasional sympathetic glance from the other passengers. I wasn't to be put off, however, and utilising my keen engineering instincts I applied some advanced paperclip technique to shove the wheels back on and secure (I use the word loosely) the escape route. Then I could wobble into Ferihegy Airport terminal 2A, make the usual discovery that I should be in 2B, and roll on over to the check-in. Wrecked already!

The flight to Beijing was an hour and a half late taking off, as the cabin crew counted the passengers over and over again to try to get their figures right - and old Ryanair trick which is often followed by the announcement "Please check your boarding pass to make sure you are on the right flight". Twud be a bit of a pain if you were only going to Vienna and suddenly found yourself racing through the timezones to China. The flight flew. Always a good thing. But the time passed fairly slowly really. I watched Becoming Jane on the TV. Nice film. And I read in the English-language China Daily that the current difficulties in Kenya prove that democracy is not the answer. In the back of my mind was the fact that such a delay taking off meant there wasn't much chance of me getting the connecting flight to Shanghai. But lo and behold, get it I did after major sprint through Beijing airport, through the hordes of people shouting 'ticket, ticket' who pretend to be airport officials but are actually touting for hotel business. I wonder what they'd do if you handed over your ticket without realising what was happening. Every staff-member I met was extremely polite and they all spoke English. There is a great sense of Olympic preparation at the airport. A short walk to the airplane in the refreshing -10 was my only chance to breathe the air of the Capital, for the moment, and to cool down after my Olympic-qualifying airport traversimication.

More delays on the way to Shanghai, but I sat beside a nice man who had been on the flight from Budapest too, and he asked if I wanted to use his mobile to ring Hailing. Sorted.

On arrival in Shanghai I was whisked off in a brand new Lexus, belonging to a friend of Hailing's, but the whisking only lasted until the carpark gate, where we had to sit for about 20 minutes while Gordon Brown and his entourage got priority leaving the airport. Weaving and beeping our way along the Shanghighway (boom boom!) I saw the many many huge buildings which create a weird impression of mixing Paris with New York. I was struck (not literally, thankfully) by the number of big, snazzy cars along the way, which gave way (but only in one sense, and not the polite one) to the mopeds, bicycles, rickshaw-types and electric scooters once we crossed the river into Pudong district. There was quite a thick fog sitting on the city, so I'm looking forward to seeing it on a clear day. My guidebook has fantashtic photos of the Shanghai river view and the night skyline. I felt like I was in an American film whizzing along between the skycrapers and trading beepy insults with whizzing Audis, Buicks and other vehicles of the upper class and generously proportioned variety.

I can't believe it is still today..it goes on and on!!

Switched over to Hailing's (very stylish) VW in Pudong and made our way to her flat, where I had a delicious Chinese lunch, soon to be followed by a delicious Chinese dinner. A 3-hour snooze in the afternoon will hopefully set me on the road to jetlag recovery, and I think I'm only marvellous for getting up after 3 hours despite the temptation to sleep forever. The rain is battering the windows here but I'm happy doing absolutely nothing today.

Right, that's enough for today. I'm off to have a cup of tea. I wouldn't change that habit for all the tea in...ok, enough of that! Bye!


Note to non-native English speaking (actually non-Leitrim resident) readers - the above blog contains several words you will not find in your dictionary. That's probably a good thing.

Rois

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