02: Our first hours in China

We land at 15:10 local time and it was so smooth I didn’t even realise we were on the ground until the reverse thrust kicked in and my magazine shot forward and hit the front of my pod!

Locating our tour rep proved a bit difficult, we couldn’t find him in the Arrivals Lounge so looked outside... not there either... bad move going outside ‘cos now we can’t get back in! Had to walk down to the Departure Lounge entrance where we had to put our cases through a scanner and then walk back up to where we started, by which time a group of

English people had started grouping together and fortunately they were part of our tour group. Once he’d gathered all thirty-six of us together we set off to find our coach.

Now this involved going up a floor by lift and he corralled us into one of the three huge lifts saying to meet him on the 2nd floor. The passenger at the front pressed the button, we started to move and then the lift violently bounced to a halt, leaving us stranded between floors... our landing in the Boeing 777-300 was far gentler! Luckily it burst back into life and deposited us back down to where we started, our lift operator tried this three times before we decided to get out rather than being stuck in there for ever. The tour guide was still there wondering what was going on and split us up into two lifts in case it was the weight that was the problem!

Once all in the coach, he introduced himself as Max and said that he was our guide for the whole tour, that Jen was our local Shanghai guide and that our driver was Jack (as all our drivers were going to be apparently!) It was an hour and a half drive to our hotel, and for three quarters of the journey Max explained all we needed to know about the tour and our time in China, his Chinglish, as he called it, was very good and he was quite entertaining and easy to listen to. The traffic heading into the city was chock a block, being Friday rush hour... and we thought our rush hour was bad...!!!

Our coach pulled up to The Ocean Hotel at 18:10 and within a couple of minutes we were heading up to Room 622. It was the standard sort of layout, being rectangular with the bathroom in one corner of it, unusual thing here was that the

wall between the bath and the beds was glass... very strange! We were given until seven o’clock to get settled in and freshen up a bit before going to a nearby restaurant for our first ever Chinese dinner actually in China!

An interesting experience, we were all set up on four round tables, each with a large lazy susan. Various dishes were set out for us, some looked familiarish, others certainly didn’t. There wasn’t really quite enough food for the eight of us on the table but we got enough to sustain life at least...!!!

Back at the hotel we had a nice bath (in one of the smallest baths ever seen) before getting our heads down in what was a very hard, yet surprisingly comfortable bed. We’re told that all beds in China are hard, so let’s hope we can sleep alright!