Shanghai: May 30-31: Flying to Shanghai

As I didn't want a mess on the way to Shanghai like the one that happened on the way to Cleveland the previous week, I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to kill: 2.5 hours. (The bus arrived on time and everything went smoothly.) Once it was time, I boarded the plane, finding my seat in the 777 (enormous!). (The economy section is nine seats across, 3-3-3.)

I took these pictures during this day's travel.

As the first example of good service on All Nippon Air, the woman checking me in suggested changing my seat; I'd forgotten to ask whether better seats had become available after I bought my ticket. She remembered. She got me the seat I want on long-haul flights: an aisle seat with an empty middle seat next to me, meaning I can get up to stretch whenever I want and never have to get up for anyone else.

The second example of good service came when I awoke. (To get on Chinese time, I attempted and succeeded in sleeping at the beginning of the flight, in total sleeping the first fourty percent of the trip.) Within ten minutes of waking up, a stewardess came to me and offered me drinks and a meal. (I'd slept through the first meal service.)

As a third example, before meal service, the stewardesses brought everyone warm, moist towelettes to help people clean up.

Incidentally, the magazine and entertainment programming are multilingual.

When I arrived in Tokyo, even after a thirty-minute health inspection/quarantine on the plane, I still had another 2.5 hours to waste. Some people in the airport wore surgical masks; I'm not sure if this is related to the health inspection or whether some people donned them out of precaution. Anyway, I spent the time walking the perimeter of the international terminal, gazing at funky-looking Japanese sweets, elegant sake bottles, and plastic displays of food (in front of each restaurant), all scattered among the countless duty-free shops. A surprising number of these shops sold jewelry/watches or cosmetics. I found a shop selling pretty lacquered boxes. I also found a cool origami museum, an outpost of a larger museum elsewhere in Japan. Although the individual pieces weren't that good, I enjoyed the scale of some displays. Given the terminal's large size (60 gates), walking it fully used most of the time I had to kill.

When I landed in China, I had to go through quarantine again, though the Chinese were clearly more paranoid about it than the Japanese. While the Japanese inspectors wore masks and what looked like surgical aprons and talked to only a fraction of the people and took even fewer temperatures, the Chinese inspectors wore bio-hazard gear, including masks over their eyes, and took everyone's temperature using an infra-red laser.

The trip from the airport to where I was staying was long, convoluted, and frustrating. Language was confusing. Train stations shutting down threw a wrench into my plans. An unknowledgeable taxi driver was a problem. Poor signage was an issue.