When I planned my last trip to China, I was a little worried about having enough time to change planes in Shanghai on the way home. But I shrugged it off, thinking that if I missed the daily flight between Pudong and Vancouver, I would just get a day to visit Shanghai.
Leaving Qingdao
On the day my daughter and I were to fly home, our flight from Qingdao to Shanghai was going to be delayed several hours. The airline graciously booked us on another flight on another airline that was scheduled to leave 30 minutes earlier. (Good thing we got to the airport early!)
That flight left late because it was held up by all the people from our flight rushing to board at the last minute, and we arrived in Shanghai at the originally scheduled time. We speed-walked for 20 minutes to get to baggage claim, then fidgeted through security (why did we have to go through security to leave the terminal? I’ll never know). Then we speed walked for what had to have been two miles to get to the international terminal. We finally arrived at the check-in counter almost exactly two hours before our scheduled departure. Where we stood in a line that never moved.
Stuck in Pudong
I was used to the patient air of resignation that accompanied long lines in Asia (I’d experienced it at this very airport before), and this didn’t feel like it. In an hour, maybe six people moved through the check-in counter. Some of them did a good bit of yelling in Chinese. Finally the line started moving, but by the time we reached the counter, I kind of already knew we weren’t going to make our flight.
That was fortunate, because the woman at the counter never even acknowledged us. She ignored my questions, and refused to make eye contact as she unhurriedly went about some inscrutable business. Then she walked away. A few minutes later, the person at the next station noticed us and came over to help. She explained that the flight was overbooked and we would be scheduled on the next day’s flight, exactly 24 hours later.
Then she counted out $450 worth of RMB, stuffed it in an envelope. She handed it to me with the name of a hotel whose shuttle we were supposed to catch outside. By the time we got outside, that shuttle had left, and we had to go back in, stand in line, and request a new one. We were booked into another hotel. This time we got the shuttle, and it dropped us off in the hotel. It was a nice enough hotel, except for the sign on the wall forbidding smoking and prostitution. (Yeah, I really should have taken a picture of that – oh wait, I did.)
But as you can see from the view out our window, it was roughly in the middle of nowhere. Not near enough to the airport to take the train into town; not near enough to Shanghai to even find a cab, let alone pay for the drive into the city.
A Day in Shanghai
So my daughter watched cartoons all afternoon. We ate a tasty but overpriced dinner in the restaurant downstairs. I stayed up most of the night watching the door that didn’t seem to close properly. The next morning we had breakfast in the same downstairs restaurant. We caught the next shuttle back to the airport, where we immediately checked in.. Once we secured our spot on the plane, we had six hours to kill in Pudong’s international terminal.
And that is how our unplanned night in Shanghai didn’t turn into a chance to see Shanghai after all. For our next trip to China, we’re flying through Beijing.
