Make a Hole Make it Wide

I really do not know where to begin.   So far our trip to Shanghai has been full of many "adventures" to say the least.  It all begin in the Chengdu airport.  I said from the beginning that while in Chengdu I was going to let everyone else take the lead, once we were on our week alone, I was taking charge.  Really what happened was that no one would plan anything, so I gave the job to myself.  Before leaving the school, we all weighed our luggage to see if we were overweight or not.  We were all a little worried with all those mahjong tiles.  Some of us were a bit over, so we moved things around and made it work.  At the airport, I checked the four of us in, and the guy started to take our bags and weight them and send them off.  We were watching each bag, and only one bag was 3 kg over.  Suddenly right before we put the last bag on he is like oh you are overweight.  Except he doesn't speak any English and has to have some other lady come over and tell us this.  She then tries to explain to us that we are 56 kg overweight. And each pound you are overweight is 22 yuan which adds up to a nice 1232 yuan which is almost 200 dollars.  Since I knew that there was no way that this was correct I tried to argue, but at this point our luggage has disappeared and we still had yet to get our tickets or our passports back.  David and Samantha who had dropped us off, already left so we were stuck with an annoyed Chinese who spoke no English.  We decided to call David who didn't understand and then our professor Dr. Zhao.  We handed the phone to the guy, and had Dr. Zhao try and explain things to him, and to us what  in the heck was going on.  She talked to him for a long time, but with no resolve.  He then handed the phone back to me and Dr. Zhao was like umm you might want to try and find someone else to talk to and then said after a couple of minutes she was going to call AirChina and have someone to talk to us.  The dude worker was saying that his scales were not off and we were 56 kg overweight total for our 8 bags. This though was impossible, and I knew this, so I was refusing to pay this 1200 fine unless it was proved to me.  The Geer in me came out, if this guy spoke English, he would have heard an ear full.  Poor Dr. Zhao did have to hear my aggression.  Then these wonderful people decided to take a picture of me during the fiasco and they also heard an earful.  They didn't speak English so I don't think they quite understood.  We ended up standing there for about 20 minutes, and then finally all of sudden he hands me our tickets and passports. I was a bit confused at first, but then just told the girls to book it and we left.  I was fully expecting him to come running after us we were a bit afraid all through security and getting our luggage in Shanghai that it was going to never appear but Jesus does love us all and we had no more problems...well at least in the luggage category.

We arrived in the Pudong Airport in Shanghai, with quite the adventure awaiting us.  How do we get to our hotel?  I had read online that our hotel has a shuttle service.  So we found the hotel shuttle buses but there is no New Asia Hotel.  We got out the phone and called the hotel and found out now that there is no shuttle.  Plan B!  The hotel lady mentioned a train, being the best way to get to the city.  We went back inside the airport and found by a picture for Maglev Train.  We lugged our tons of luggage (we each had two pieces of luggage and two carry ons) we looked quite comical lugging it all around.  We found and got the train, which was pretty cool.  It was an 8 min train ride that took us about 35 km.  It went quite fast.  We got off this train, and changed trains to the local subway.  We lugged our luggage once again and got on the subway and took the train to the nearest station to were we believed our hotel was.  We bought a map in the airport that had our hotel on it.  (So thankful we bought this map).  After getting off the train, we really had no clear direction as to where our hotel was.  We knew it was kind of far, and we were quite tuckered out from all our luggage lugging, so we decided to flag down some taxis.  We had to get two because of all of our stuff.  We showed the taxi driver the map and our hotel and he says ok, ok, 50 yuan. Being as tired as we were we said sure and got in.  Jeannette and I got in the first taxi, and Anna and Fatema got in the second one.  Our taxi drivers talked to each other and their taxi followed our taxi.  We went in what felt like circles for awhile, up and down streets, with every once in a while asking to see the map.  At one point we stopped completely and our driver got out and talked to the over driver.  He got back in and then the other taxi went the over way. We lost them!  We drove around again for another 10 minutes, the taxi driver ended up calling someone, who knows and finally after just about forever we made it.  When we got in I saw a wonderful surprise that the other girls had made it before us.  After checking in, we were quite ready to get some much needed sleep.  Quite an exhausting day...but through it all we made it work. :)