Now that my grievances are out of the way, on to the recap, the play-by-play, of my trip to China. I went with Mishiro sensei to Fukuoka airport, about a 2 hour drive or so. I even got to drive. We got on the plane and flew to Shanghai where we had to catch a connecting flight, so far so good. Then, uh oh! It takes our bus about 25 minutes to get into the terminal (no jetways), and the slowest immigration process in the whole world (our guy was a real prick, he was peering over my passport with a magnifying glass like it was a live specimen), so it took us an hour and a half to get through immigration. In the meantime, our connecting flight had been closed. Gone, outta here. We're stuck in Shanghai airport, can't speak Chinese, uh oh... so far things are shaping up like a disaster.
Finally, we call our travel agency, talk to some people on the ground, and find a nice business hotel near the airport to stay at. There was even some pretty decent food at the hotel, and we could see the famous Maglev train from our window. So far, I'm thinking, 'China is a lot like Japan', but of course, airports and business hotels are roughly the same anywhere. We changed our tickets for a flight the next morning. So that wasn't bad. But, thanks to missing the flight, we lost half a day in Xian.
We get up and fly to Xian without any problems. At Xian airport we meet our guide and driver, and head out for the Terra Cotta warrior museum. This was my first real exposure to the pollution there... the haze was everywhere and it stunk too. We make it there and head over the exhibits, with our guide who speaks Japanese but no English, so that was fun to try and decipher what she was saying. Fortunately I can say this part was totally worth it. The warriors were made 2,000 years ago, with incredible craftmanship and detail (every one has a unique face, for example). Very cool and I recommend it to anyone. Then, we stopped at a gift shop and paid way to much for some replicas. Lesson learned on that one.
Next, we stopped at what we thought was an art museum in the city, but it turns out they were actually trying to sell us some art/antiques. Weird. Back to the hotel, which was nice, too bad we would only stay there one night. At dinner, we started talking to our waitress who was studying Japanese at university. In a move that was potentially really dangerous, we went with her after dinner to try some gyoza, which is supposed to be famous in Xian. The food was pretty good and she was really cool , but yeah going with her like that was a stupid risk on our part if you think about it. The next day, we got up and boarded an airplane for our next stop...
NEXT UPDATE>>> BEIJING!