June 15/16:  more travel days!

We needed to be at the airport early as we were traveling internationally, but not as early as most days—9!  We needed to get ziploc bags (to keep stuff dry as it rains a lot in the Philippines!) and mail some postcards.

 

What can we say, it’s going to be a long two days!

It’s always painless to use the San Francisco airport, but we’ve never traveled internationally from there before. We chose the international terminal, and proceeded through all the necessary stops in order to travel outside of our country. We actually had to stop at a China Eastern stand, a Delta affiliate, to get our tickets since we could not access that online and have the mobile tickets. Everybody was very helpful.

This plane was really huge with rows of 3, 4, and 3 and we were in row 40 with a LOT behind us!  It’s like taking an entire town on vacation.

The flight from San Francisco to Shanghai was 12 hours. Yes, you read correctly. What does a person do for 12 hours on a plane? You use the restroom—that makes you walk around!!  You read books, you watch movies, you eat 2 1/2 meals, and sleep a lot.  We watched “Finding Nemo,” because of the turtles(!), and the newest “Spiderman” movie—the one with multiple dimensions and thus multiple spidermen (or women or kids or pigs, in this case!).  I’m not sure what it’s exactly called as the Internet's wonky, but it came out last fall and heard it was really good. It was! We also had meals on the plane, with our first choice being shrimp with rice or mashed potatoes.  The mashed potato option landed up having roast beef with it.  We didn’t hear the roast part but it turned out delish.  A bit later we had a snack which was half a sandwich; we’re not sure exactly what was in it. :-) I think it was egg salad.  Then later we had supper, which was an omelette. 

Almost immediately upon boarding the asked us to close our windows.  That is sad as we love to watch the world below us! They kept the cabin fairly dark and really only turned on the lights fully to eat two meals (They mystery sandwich was served in the dark.) and when we were readying to land.

We got off at Shanghai airport and anytime you land in international, you have to go through immigration/customs/whatever. Since we were transferring to another location, that’s the herd of people we followed. We were required to go through a temperature sensing device—it looked like an X-ray machine but was for sensing our temps!  They literally were taking our temperatures to make sure that nobody was sick coming into the country. It makes sense, as they have a lot of people.  We found our gate, and then went in search of bottled water, and a place to walk and sit and walk and sit. The water dispensers in the airport dispenses warm or hot water, not even a room temperature option!  Most of the places sold “boxes” of ready to eat food—just add hot water! So it makes sense I guess! 

We had to go through bag checks and scans again even though we hadn’t left the secure part of the airport!  This time we had to actually remove our battery packs from our luggage (the ones we use to charge our phones in an emergency). That was the first time that’s happened. Andrew’s one tiny little Ziploc bag of toiletries had to be removed from his bag and his backpack re-scanned. My multiple Ziploc bags of toiletries made it through fine. Go figure. I do carry a very small bottle of Tea-tree oil in my purse, and they did notice that and wanted to see it close up. I did get to keep it, thank goodness!

When it was time to actually board our plane, everyone just sort of herded themselves to the gate. There were no lines organizing us, whether by priority or business class, or numerical order, or anything. We actually got on several shuttle buses, and they drove forever and ever and ever to a plane parked far away, and then we just walked across the tarmac and climbed up the steps and got into our seats. Very interesting process.

We were served another meal (All the meals are probably close to what actual meals should look like—small portions!), options of beef and noodles or pork and rice.  Then we crashed (slept, in this case!) for a good chunk of this 4-5 hour flight.  

They say airplanes are cold but these sure weren’t! We did get pillows and blankets and earbuds for their devices. 

When we departed our plane, we again followed the herd of people because we knew we had to check in with immigration. There was no sense or natural indicator of what line we should be in, even though from a distance we could see the Philippine passport area  and the foreign passport area. But there must’ve been 1000 people from all different flights coming in having to go through this process of being admitted. I wondered as we waited as several people were filling out little forms.  We had to do that before, but we didn’t get any on the plane, so we did not fill anything out. Our bad because once we got to the clerk we had to go back and get a form and fill it out—passport info, where we are from, what are we doing go there, where are we staying, etc.);  we got a new place back of the line. Not a problem, just more time.  We actually landed earlier (10:20) so we’re having visions of a long night’s sleep! But this process took every bit an hour! 

Then we were directed to customs where bags were being scanned again, but he just ushered us through. Perhaps older, tired-looking couples get a reprieve? We looked for terminal three because that is where our hotel crosswalk was. However, since we landed in terminal one, got caught in the mass amounts of people in terminal one, and exited terminal one, we had to come up with a backup plan as we couldn’t access terminal three any longer.  There were lots of people offering their taxi services, but we noticed a free shuttle service across the street for many of the hotels as well as the casino, so we took that option.  

We had just missed the shuttle so had to wait another 20 minutes or so.  It took us to our hotel and we actually had our bags checked over and we were scanned just to enter the hotel. That was a little interesting. We finally got to our hotel room about 12:20 AM on June 17–while it was 12:30 PM June 16 in Indiana.  Traveling west we crossed the international date line and “gained” some hours! 

There were guards/security, both male and female, everywhere we went.  Different varieties of guns from small to large.

Time to sleep uninterrupted!