Okay I wrote this really long entry on my laptop and through a series of really silly mistakes, I removed the battery without saving the Notepad file so I’m quite upset now.

I’ll try to keep things short this time.

1) We left Frankfurt for Shanghai.

2) We were taking China Eastern airlines, the cheapest flight available from Singapore to Europe. It also means that you have to stop at Shanghai for a connecting flight, but we didn’t mind. Since we can stay at Shanghai without any extra charges, my Dad chose the transit flight to be on the Friday, 20th of June, leaving me just two days to completely all my undone work I left in Singapore.

3) Cheap airlines are really good for long-distance flights. Because they’re not really that popular, the flights are never fully booked. So we could simply sit anywhere we liked and it was practically one person per row of seats. You can just take off your shoes and lie down across four seats, and sleep through the flight. They have enough free seats for that.

4) Because of poor service, the cabin where they store the food and drinks is unmanned. So you can just enter the cabin, grab whatever drink you like and walk off. Self-service. At the end of the flight, I had 11 cups stacked in my seat’s cup holder.

5) Arrived at Shanghai. Took the Maglev train to the city at 430 km/h. One thing I like about the Shanghai Maglev trains is that the train takes a route parallel to the highway roads, and sometimes cuts through towns and farms. It’s never boring to see how cars are four times slower than you.

6) We tranferred to the underground train system. We asked a local for directions to our hotel (address written down on a paper), and he directed us to this station. We went there, and asked another guy. Guy says it’s the wrong station, and directed us to another station. Asked around again, wrong station. Went to yet another station, and asked around. Wrong.

What did we ever do to China to deserve this?

We decided to get back up to the surface and walk there.

7) Jet lag was a killer. We slept through the entire afternoon.

8) Shanghai’s smog atmosphere is awful.

9) On the brighter side, now our SGD seems so large. HAH.

10) The change in timezones makes me feel like I’ve got 6 hours of my life stolen away from me.