Day 0: Turbulant Landing

Listening: Stay on the streets of this town and they'll be carving you up alright. They say you got to stay hungry. Hey, baby, I'm just about starving tonight.

What's my problem? I'm afraid of the dark?

It was dark when I arrived in Shanghai. Customs was kind of a joke. Not to say that they just let anyone breeze by, but for a strict communist regime, I expected to at least have my bags opened is not a body cavity search. Well, I wasn't expecting a body cavity search, but even at passport control there was at least one hottie telling people to move along.

At the baggage carousel, I encountered a middle aged white guy wearing a Red Sox cap. Apparently, he was on my same flight, and I used this opportunity to knock the rust off of my typical icebreaker of, "So, where you from?"

It turned out that he was from Southie but he worked in Michigan. Small world. It was a pretty good ease into a place where I knew I wouldn't feel at ease. Apparently, he had a woman "friend" who was a local and was going to see her. I know that I have woman friends in various countries, but when I hear that a middle aged white guy has a woman "friend" in a foreign country, it automatically throws up a red flag in my mind. It's not that he was the typical overweight, balding, poorly dressed middle aged white man in khakis and sneakers. He was a respectably good looking middle aged white man in jeans and a button-down shirt in smart shoes. Even though he had a baseball cap on, I could tell he had a full head of hair, but that was neither here nor there. The red flag went up, and once a flag goes up, I tend to let the ruling on the field stand.

When we got out of customs, we parted ways. I immediately looked for the bank that was partnered with my bank in the States. I found out that I could withdraw money from those ATMs without any service charges. I would only have to deal with the current day's foreign exchange rate.

Travel Tip: When traveling abroad, go to your bank and find out if they have any partner banks in the country that you're traveling to. It can save you tons on transaction fees. It's also a good idea to notify your bank as to your international travel plans so they don't freeze your account for potential fraud.

The problem was that I had the bank name listed on a piece of paper deep in my pack. I knew that the bank had the word "Construction" in the name, but, as I quickly found out, there is more than one bank in China that incorporates the word "Construction" in it. I didn't know that. So I go to the first ATM with the word "Construction" on it, ICBC or International Construction Bank of China. I put in my ATM card and it tells me that it can't give me any money. I'm like, "what the hell?!?" I tried it three times to no avail.

There was another ATM next to the ICBC ATM, so I sucked it up and used my other ATM card in the other ATM. The fact that my primary ATM card couldn't even pull out cash, let alone pull out cash without a transaction fee worried me, so I pulled out the maximum that I could get.

When I get out to the cab stand, I see the guy from Southie again. He says that his woman "friend" lives in Puxi (west of the Huangpu River). I thought that I was going to Pudong (east of the river). He asked me if I wanted to share a cab and that we could drop me off first and then him. However, since that red flag was still there, I opted out. I knew nothing about Shanghai other than the cursory knowledge I picked up from my Rough Guide.

I hate taking taxis in places that I'm unfamiliar with. There's so much potential to be literally and figuratively taken for a ride. I had my hotel details printed out in both Chines and in English and showed the cab stand attendant the paper. The cab driver and the attendant exchanged words, and the paper was handed back to me and I in turn handed it to the cab driver when I entered the cab. He started driving, but after twenty feet or so, he stopped, popped out of the cab and went back to the attendant to, only what I could assume, ask him a question about how to get there.

The roads between Shanghai's Pudong International Airport and The Bund are virtually empty at half past midnight. We flew long the freeway on fly overs and elevated roads, watching the bright lamp post pass me by, not only from in front of me, but from the roads beneath me.

A few times in the journey, the taxi driver asked me, I think, little questions on how to get to my hotel. I was damned if I knew, but I used one of the few phrases that has stuck in my head from my three years of Mandarin classes, "Dui bu qi. Wo ting bu dong. (I'm sorry, I don't understand.)"

When we did finally pull up to the hotel, I figured out that the straight shot that we drove was, in fact, the right way to be going. The only misgiving that I had was that the trip was about a third more expensive than I anticipated. It was late. I was hungry, and I had a large enough stack of Maos in my pocket, that I let it go. On top of that, my guidebook was two years old. As I found out, China changes very rapidly.

Now, when I got out of the cab, I immediately thought to myself, "What have I gotten myself into?" The area around my hotel, when I looked around, seemed rather desolate. There were large, four lane streets, but not a lot of lights. The lone light source that I saw from the corner that my hotel was on was my hotel and the convenient store next door, which, conveniently, there was an entrance into right from the lobby.

When I went to check in, the lobby desk was empty. There was a man in a suit sitting at the public use computer, playing cards, rockin' a cigarette that needed to be ashed five drags ago. Immediately, he snapped up off the stool, dropping his butt into the ashtray, and ran behind the desk.

He greeted me in Mandarin.

"Check in?" I said.

He looked confused.

"Umm... reservation? "

I pulled out my printout from agoda.com that had all of my check in information.

"Ah. Hao, hao. (Right, right) Check. In."

As he pulls up my reservation in the computer, a rather attractive girl in a black business suit appears out of nowhere and makes her way behind the desk. She takes my passport and processes it with the scanner and asks me for the first time, but far from the last time over my trip, where my entry point was. See, it seems that the person at passport control didn't really stamp hard enough, so the Pudong details weren't really legible. I must have had to answer that question at least twenty times when checking into hotels and hostels.

Traveler Tip: Always check your entry and exit stamps when you go through passport control. If they miss-stamp your passport with the wrong date or people can't verify your entry and exit, you're the one liable. If someone stamps you with the wrong date and your visa is "expired" because of that date, you might get booted from the country.

After I checked in, I'm brought up to my room. It's small, as promised on the internet, but it's enough for me. It's a hell of a lot more luxurious than any of the other places that I stayed during the rest of my travels. The guy from check in leaves me and I look around the room. My room was supposed to have an in-room safe, but I couldn't seem to find it. I always book my first few nights in a comfortable room with an in-room safe so that I can adjust to the new time zone without having to worry about other people in the room with me and the safe so that I can spend the first few days with most of my valuables locked up free to roam about the new environment with only cash and ID in my pocket.

When I figured out that there was no in-room safe, I went back down to reception to ask where it was. The people at reception didn't understand what I was asking for, so we turned to the computer. Luckily, I knew that Google knows all and that it has a translator. So I typed the word "safe." Then he typed back asking me if I thought that the hotel was "unsafe." I reworded my question. I told him via Google translator that agoda.com said that there would be a safe locker or safe box in the room that I could keep things in. Then there was the "A-ha!" moment in his brain. He told me that there were no in-room safes, but if I wanted to keep anything at the front desk, it would be perfectly safe there. I declined.

Upon returning to my room, I unpacked, locked up my Pacsafe to the shower door handle with the towel draped over it, re-packed and headed back downstairs to fill my incredibly empty stomach. I asked if there were any places still serving food around the hotel. He pointed me up the street, the dark sketchy street.

Reluctantly, I started walking. To be honest, I was a little creeped out. There was no traffic on the road. There really wasn't anyone walking on the streets, save for a couple of groups of drunk kids (as opposed to winos). Lamp posts flickered at times, and storefronts were closed up. Aside from the convenient store at my hotel, I found two other convenient stores (none of which had local sim cards), a 24 hour fast food noodle shop and a KFC. I was unimpressed with the selection after four blocks, so I kept walking. It just seemed to get bleaker and bleaker. So, I turned around, went back to my hotel and walked a few blocks perpendicular to the street I was walking on. Nothing. So, I resigned myself to going to the fast food noodle joint, because I'll be damned if I'm going to support KFC's takeover of the world. That, and bums LOVE to crash at KFCs, at least in China.

That first meal in China wasn't bad... but it sure wasn't good. It was a beef noodle soup that was lacking in any real flavor. Sure, it was cheap and it filled the tank, but you knew that there was no love going into this food. The girls working the register were just short of falling asleep, as was the rest of the staff if they weren't playing cards. The one guy who was in there when I walked in finished as I was waiting for my food. I was the lone man in a restaurant, something I aspire to never be.

By the time I got back to my room, it was half past two in the morning. I survived, what I thought, was the sketchiness of the street, but was still a little bit wound up. So, to the convenient store, I went. One beer down the hatch and nighty-night.