China Trip 6/15/2013

Howdy!  Some of this is going to be a repeat.  The following narrations are from Doug's recollections of our trip.  We were so busy we ended up not journaling as we went.  Going to post each day's activities and photos.  I do have to say both Doug and I are disappointed in the quality of our photos.  We apparently need to take some photography lessons and/or take the plunge and buy a nice camera.  Anyways, here we go!

We left the house early at 6:00AM to catch a reasonable flight time of 8:40AM out on Saturday. First we flew to Detroit, and had a short layover for the big flight from Detroit to Shanghai Pudong airport.  This was on a 777, and was packed to the gills as normal on all flights are now-a-days.
This was a 14 hour flight, but we lost a day crossing the
International Date line, so we arived Sunday afternoon at 2:50PM in Shanghai!  Customs was pretty quick and grabbing the bags and getting through was fairly painless. 

Our hotel at Shanghai airport.

We met our guide Jane at the airport, we'll see more of Jane at the end of the trip. She told us that she had already sent several other families to Beijing which we are skipping the first part of, so we can visit Lily's orphanage first.  We can get in more of the rest of site seeing later on in the trip. 

We headed to the Airport hotel at Shanghai Pudong, and it was
decorated like a Chinese version of the Jetsons. The beds were round, the walls were all rounded, with round alcoves, the TV was mounted on a pole with a rounded rectangle cabinet underneath which turned out to be where the mini-bar fridge was! The shower was even curved and had modern "rain-fall" shower head mounted directly overhead. The other weird thing about this hotel is that all rooms start with the number 8, which is "lucky" in Chinese culture. All businesses try to get phone numbers with 8 in them (ie the cell phone # 138-8888-8888 was supposedly sold for RMB50,000).

Very tired girl.

Funky furniture.

Doug really likes the chinese beds, they tend to be pretty firm, and 
tend to be lower to the ground. All bed coverings in China/Asia
are a duvet/quilt instead of seperate sheets/blankets, which is pretty comfortable in all the rooms that all have too cold
air-conditioning. Most times we spent a lot of time adjusting the air so it wasn't soo cold. (Nancy here...there is no such thing as too cold a room :)

We split into two side-by-side rooms, as there are no connected rooms in China (excpet some in the White Swan in Guangzhou) it seems. All rooms also either have a king sized bed, or two double-sized beds. There are no rooms that hae two queens or kinds either. We suspect a family of 4 Chinese family will probably just get on room with a king sized bed and sleep altogether, but for us super-sized Americans, we got two rooms all the time. Sometimes we could have gotten away with one, sometimes not, as even some rooms were a bit cramped with just two of us in one (although Rose tends to spread out to fill up as much space with her stuff at all times). 

After freshening up a bit, we headed out to explore the airport
complex. Jane mentioned the Maglev train, and we decided to take a ride on it. It cost about RMB40 a person for a round trip IIRC. 
It felt a lot more like a subway ride than a train. It has a
display of how fast the train goes. It got up to 304km/h according to the display, (190MPH) and we were just zipping through to get closer to downtown Shanghai, but we still were pretty far out away from the river/downtown area where most of the interesting things are located.

Sleek!

Some smiley passengers.

Wheeeee!  That's fast!

We saw some restaurants, and Rose wanted to eat dumplings in China right-a-way! We chose the Wu Da Niang dumpling store (I think that is Aunty Wu's). Rose helped to order some dumplings and drinks, using her Mandarin language skills. The store looked like some cross of what Chinese think American fast food restaurants are, except after you place your order at the counter and pay, they bring the food out, serve you sauces and clean up after (and during-some of us haven't quite mastered chopstickes, even after all these years!)  when you leave. Self-service is NOT a Chinese expectation. 

Rose got some fried dumplings (ie. potstickers) that she loved, and
some steamed dumpings, and a soup dumplings (the kind cooked in soup, not that are steamed with soup inside). The price was pretty cheap, maybe RMB30-40 for the first round for us to eat.   Nancy here again - the staff at the restaurant were quite intrigued with the girls being with caucasian parents.  They asked of Lily "She one of us?"  It's hard to convey "adoption" to the Chinese.

Hey!  Wait for me! (Just kidding)

Rose admiring the view from the platform.

After dinner, we got back on the Maglev train and zoomed back to the Pudong airport hotel for us to spend the night.   Both girls fell asleep on the train.