Xi'an to Shanghai

28th January
 
We got some cheap ass flights to Shanghai, easy as pie perhaps if we'd gotten out of bed on time, caught in the mist of proper drinking game last night we had not set an alarm nor packed our bags...a schoolboy error to be fair, be left the hostel at 11:15 to catch a 14:00 flight, however the shuttle to the airport takes an hour in light traffic and it took 20 minutes to get to the shuttle and it only leaves every 20 minutes so 11:50 we departed and luckily enough traffic wasn't too heavy. We arrived in the airport and had to collect tickets from some counter for what reason I don't know but we got that sorted and went through immigration, who stared at my picture for 5 minutes and looked at me and then started to laugh at the difference in the pictures. 13:25 we were in the main hall and hadn't eaten so in the middle of eating my noodles the final call for our flight was announced..grrr there's no messing around in this country! Stuffed as much as I could into my gob and headed towards the gate. No problems whatsoever, we flew China Eastern Air which were excellent and like the last Chinese carrier the plane was spotless and modern..we even got a free juice onboard! Well that was the easy part, I kid you not.
 
Our flight arrived just after 4 pm but we didn't arrive to our hostel until 20:00...here's what happened, we got the airport shuttle which took about 2 hours and to be fair it was a fair old distance to the airport, once we arrived we had to get the subway and then a 5 minute walk, the Subway has to be the biggest subway I've ever been to we had to walk over a kilometre to the platform! Not fun with bags that are getting heavier by the minute..one stop and then a 5 minute walk, we've done the hard part! Not a chance we went the wrong direction thanks to the incorrect sign in the station, done about 40 minutes loop of the area and asked many people, fortunately some French dude with perfect Chinese helped us find the way. It was down this one way street that looked like a laneway so I never would have guessed it and at this stage after F-ing and Blinding each other we were relieved ti see the sign in front of us.
 
The staff are really nice here and we got an upgrade on our room, the heater was on for us already. We got taling to one of the staff called Mimi in the common area and she was reallly nice, we were happy to stay and eat there but there wasn't much to choose from, she said she'd bring us somewhere so we followed her down the road and she dropped us off at an Italian restauant..I had to laugh but she said she's eaten here before and it's nice, we gave it a go and had a few dishes and some Chinese red wine, who would have thought the Chinese could produce a decent glass of Vino! A bad day but it still beat the hell out of getting the train here!