Departure and Arrival

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Ahoy,

I am writing this at 6 in the morning according to Chinese standard time. I have some jet lag, but being up at 6 in the morning is better than me wanting to just go to bed at 6 in the morning. Anyway, here's a recap of my departure:

Woke up at 3 AM and headed for the RDU airport. Almost checked in the wrong bag because we have 3 bags that look identical. Said goodbye to my brother and Dad, threw away the bottle of water I had accidentally brought, and began my trip to China. I'd already had breakfast but people in my group wanted to eat so I had a second breakfast at Bruegger's Bagels which wasn't very good. Our first flight was from Raleigh to JFK, and it went by very quickly. I was excited for the takeoff, but once we got to a constant altitude I fell asleep for the rest of the 1.5 hour journey.

There was a 4 hour transition time between the plane that took us into JFK and the one taking us out, so we had plenty of time to kill. Some people tried sleeping but looked awfully uncomfortable. I saw these two strange Jewish looking guys who had some black piece of plastic strapped to their head and black leather straps all around their arms that looked like veins. I showed the guys how to play the Galaga game for free because there were like 45 Galaga arcade games in the "fun zones". I ended up eating lunch at an Italian restaurant around what would've been 9:30 AM for me. After 4 hours of this and trying to get my sleepy group members to play a card game (we never did) the 777 that was going to take us to the Narita airport in Tokyo had arrived.

The 777 was HUGE. It was also insanely comfortable. The guy sitting next to me ended up sleeping almost 12 out of the 14 hours we were flying, limiting my ability to get up and walk around and use my knee some. One of the things one should worry about when flying for that long is blood clots, so I was doing my best to move my leg around. The 777 food wasn't that bad, but wasn't really good either. We got one snack, one full meal with chicken, rice, fruit, cookie, and some bad sushi. They followed that up with a ham sandwich after about 7 hours. When we were 2 hours away from Tokyo they gave us some pizza which didn't have much taste but it was warm and doughy. I was really impressed with the entertainment on the 777. Each seat had its own personal TV and remote. On each TV I could watch movies, popular TV shows like How I Met Your Mother, play video games, or listen to music. During the 14 hour flight I ended up watching 4 movies: Book of Eli, Tooth Fairy, Me and Marley, and the King of Jail Breakers, which is a famous Japanese movie apparently. The film was AWESOME but had a terrible ending IMO, but i would still highly recommend watching it. I also got the in-flight high score for tetris, played the hardest mini golf game i've ever played in my life (I couldn't even get 6 above par), pac-man, sudoku, and battleship. My reading light didn't work so I didn't read very much. The plane was incredibly dark because everyone wanted to sleep.

Finally, we arrived in Tokyo. My knee was upset, but walking around in an airport in my first ever overseas flight definitely brought some life back into me. Also, the fact that almost everyone working at the Narita airport was a young, pretty, Japanese girl didn't hurt. The first thing we did was go to the bathroom where we found an interesting toilet with a "Wash the Rear" button. The flight to Shanghai was delayed some so I got my ticket, exchanged US currency for some yen, and proceeded to go shopping. There were really only two stores our group could shop at because almost every store was a beauty and fashion store and we had 7 guys. I bought a snow globe with Mt. Fuji in it, some little cat thing (neko?), and a postcard. The stores featured delicacies such as Green Tea Kit Kat and Wasabi Kit Kat. 2 of our group members got some Sake. We ate our 6th meal of the day at Bowl Bowl, where there was a huge TV showing a sumo wrestling tournament going on. Being a wrestler I enjoyed watching the fat guys pound on each other in slow-mo. The remaining minutes in waiting for the plan consisted of people staring at my knee, watching sumo wrestling, and writing down what had happened so far.

The Airbus 330 arrived about an hour late in Tokyo. I don't really have much to say about this trip because i was so tired but there was an Arabic movie called Julli or Bulji or something like that, and they served me my 7th meal of the day in some bad beef and rice.

Finally we arrived in Shanghai. We went through customs, more security, exchanged some money, picked up our bags, and high tailed it out of there. There are quite a few advertisements for the upcoming world expo since its occurring in Shanghai. A bus driver picked us up and drove us about 45 minutes into Shanghai. For some reason, the airport is separate from the city and it took us a while to get back to the city. It was dark for the first time in our 32-ish hour long day, and I couldn't see the sky but couldn't tell if it was smog or fog blocking my view. Although nobody was hungry, the bus driver took us to a fancy Chinese restaurant for our 8th and final meal of the day. They brought out sweet and sour chicken, hot and sour soup, fish, chicken, teriyaki beef, Yaki Soba, fried rice, watermelon, all kinds of things. Our group members suddenly realized they were hungry and devoured almost all of it. I tried a lot of new things and was pleasantly surprised that I liked almost all of them. We got back on the bus and it drove for about 30 minutes to the Swan Hotel. This place is pretty nice but the bathroom's got a see-through wall, making going to the backroom and taking a shower awkward. The thermostat is in Celsius, so i've gotta get accustomed to which temperatures are cold and hot. Only one person can get internet at a time in the room, so getting up early actually gave me a lot of time to write this entry. The room doesn't get power unless you stick your room key into a certain slot, so its impossible to leave things on when you leave because we only have one key. Right now a shower and some breakfast sounds pretty good, but if I have time i'll upload some of my photos. "Stay tuned" as sam would say. Until next time,

No Knee Mcgee

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Comments

[Victor Lange]

Great!!!
You are the man! A world traveler, and a good writer. Be happy and call me when you can. I love you, Dad

[Swan Ly]

The SWAN Hotel, it's a sign, Chris. I'm with you, sort of, hahaha. I laughed a bunch of times while reading this, and man, so many meals! I couldn't help but notice how a lot of what you wrote about was food, hehe, but in your defense there was a LOT of food. I would probably talk about how pretty everything is, although I guess there's not too much to see in airports. Can't wait to talk to you on skype again! Lots of love, hunny bun!