Micro-updates!

Hot hot hot!

Shanghai is hot. Upon arriving, I was greeted by a new dialect of Mandarin, Shanghainese, and 100% humidity. It was abundantly clear to me why undershirts are nonexistent in China.

To get to Pudong from the airport, we took the new Maglev train. I remember reading about it in my physics book (*shivers* - despite the heat) on the chapter about magnetism. The train reaches a top speed of ~430 kilometers per hour, or more than 268 mph. Thus, for 50 RMB each, we reached Pudong in about 5 minutes. Figuratively hot!

A rose by any other name…

My dad’s full legal name is 16 letters. His Chinese name (now his legal middle name) is 7 letters. Tack on 5 for his legal first name and 4 for our last name, and you get one letter more than the maximum number of letters permitted by our airline’s database system. (This is what happens when the whole country speaks a language with largely monosyllabic words and mono/bisyllabic names.) As a result, the names on my dad’s passport and boarding passes did not match because the travel agent omitted the second-to-last letter in his middle name. At check-in, a rowdy service rep proclaimed that security would not let my dad through. (However, during his diatribe, he had my dad’s bag checked, anyway. Huh?...)

To make a long story short, the discrepancy did not prevent my dad for board the plane. However, it make for a stressful twenty minutes.

Weight for me!

We’re flying to Shanghai on a budget airline (kind of like a Chinese Jet Blue). One of the ways that the airline saves money is to restrict the weight of checked luggage to 10 kg, or 22 lbs. Considering the difficulty my family had with getting our bags down to 50 lbs. on the way over to China, this is a serious problem. We ended up having to ask my aunt to meet us in Beijing with two of our largest suitcases, stuffed full of our heaviest belongings. Yikes.

And we’re off!

Today, we left Harbin and flew south to Shanghai. It was really sad to leave family behind, and both sets of grandparents met at “Oriental Dumpling King” (Eastern is still translated as Oriental in many places). One traditional Chinese saying holds that good lucks comes to travelers if they eat dumplings as they leave a location and then pasta when they arrive at their destinations. My time in Harbin has flown by very quickly! Seeing family was wonderful, and I hope that I’ll be able to come back soon.