11 January 2008: Waiting Room

At 6.50am we were awoken by a phone call saying "Time to wake up!" The recorded message was short, sharp, and contained almost no helpful information. This was an indication of the day that was ahead of us.
Breakfast was a full buffet meal, with traditional Chinese dishes. Chris and I struggled to find food we liked, and settled for some kind of deep fried egg which we put on toast. The Chinese airline hostesses laughed at us as we ate our egg on toast. :) I didn't mind.
We went to our rooms after breakfast, and packed our things ready to catch the train to Shanghai. We discovered that internet access was available for free, so I checked a few emails, and tried to upload a few photos. Uploading photos was very slow, and I'm not sure that any of them got to their intended destination. I will have to check when we get to the next available internet access.
The fog appeared to be clearing, as some rain started to fall around the hotel. The airline thought that the rain will continue, and clear away much of the fog around Shanghai. They arranged for a coach to pick us up and take us back to the airport. There we waited, and waited, and waited. There were no planes flying anywhere because of the heavy fog.
Air China did not seem prepared to deal with such an event. It seemed that nobody on the ground had any power to do anything, or give any answers. Chris and I made friends with some fellow travelers who also spoke English. If we had not been with these people, I would have felt quite uncomfortable and worried. No announcements were made in English, so we relied on our new friends translating for us.
Around 2pm, the airline decided that we were clearly never going to fly into Shanghai, so everyone would have to bundle onto a coach, and travel 3 hours to reach Shanghai. I got a little annoyed that the airline delayed making this decision until far too late! I guess that on the bright side, Brent and Ryan were also stuck in heavy fog, so we were not holding anyone up.
Upon arriving in downtown Shanghai, we caught a taxi to the apartment we are staying at. The first taxi driver told us it would be 100RMB, which seemed very very expensive. I ssaid this is too expensive, and we found another taxi. The next taxi driver charged us 11RMB, which is less than AUD$2.
We caught up with Brent and Ryan, and went out to dinner, then wandered around the main tourist shopping district of Shanghai. The fog was still a little thick, so we couldn't get lots of good photos. We went through the Shanghai "Sight-seeing tunnel" which was a laugh! I took a video for anyone interested in seeing just how tacky the experience is. :) I'll try to upload it to YouTube, but no guarentees.