I literally finished up the previous blog post minutes before stepping out of Kel‘s apartment with all my luggage in tow at about 8:40 am. She followed me down all the way to the Didi and helped me load my comically heavy bag into the trunk of the car before we said a sad goodbye and parted. I won’t miss her apartment but I’ll miss her. She’ll be back in Edmonton for a visit during the summer though, which isn’t too far off.

The Didi ride to the airport took about 50 minutes and was notable for the driver saying “Let’s Gooo!” just as we were starting off, and “We’re here!” as we arrived at 9:43 am, but otherwise not a single word of conversation was had in between, haha. It was also the first time I had to pay extra for picking a quicker route with a toll gate, and the way that works is the driver receives an electronic token from a machine when he enters the toll area, and literally tosses the token into a box when he leaves the toll area. The receiving box connects to a machine that calculates the distance travelled based on where the token came from, and charges the driver a fee that he pays with his Weixin QR code. That amount then gets tacked on to my payable fee at the end of the ride. The Didi app told me exactly how much the fee would be for picking that route too and the number they quoted was correct, 29 yuan extra.

Entering the airport area was interesting as well. I got dropped off at the Baiyun Airport Terminal 3 departure doors, and immediately upon entering, there was a security officer who did a check for explosives by waving a wand over me and all my luggage. Then we had to briefly wait in a little containment area for a minute before the guard there removed the cord barrier and let us through. He was looking inside the airport while he was holding the cord, rather than at us, and it seemed like he was checking to make sure that there weren’t too many people in the airport at once or something before he would let us in. But this made no sense too since there actually weren’t a lot of people in the departure area at all, and waiting a few seconds made no difference to that number. Oh well.

Guangzhou Baiyun Airport’s male/female indicators on their washrooms are pretty neat though:

I found out during check-in that my bag turned out to weigh 30.3 kg, technically slightly over the 30 kg threshold that I had bought, but they allowed it through anyway. Kel said that they usually didn’t care as long as you were 0.9 kg or less over the limit. I have no idea about such things but thankfully I didn’t have to repack a thing.

The security check was a little bit sketchy as well. I have two Anker power banks with me and both of them have the triple C logo that allows them to be carried on domestic flights (this is apparently an additional requirement for domestic flights within China only and is very important to note! The logos must be clear and visible and not a sticker). However, the security lady had no idea how to do the actual wattage calculation on the battery and thought one of them was way over capacity because it as 27,650 mAh instead of WH. I didn’t really know how to correct that in Chinese and I’m not really clear on the calculation myself (I wish power banks were clearer about listing this number) either anyway so I said that it was “below 100”. She took it to a colleague who apparently knew that it was fine and thankfully waved it through.

Besides that episode, everything was fairly smooth. The immigration gate didn’t accept my passport, of course, but the manual desk only took a minute to get through. There was a little popup market right on the other side of immigration but it turned out to be just little samples of the stores that were spread out among the airside departure/arrival wings anyway.

My flight details were:

Spring Airlines 9C6722
Sat Mar 14 12:05 – 14:30
Guangzhou (Baiyun T3) to Shanghai (Hongqiao T1)

I passed immigration at 10:13 am, with slightly over an hour to go before the boarding for my flight, which started at 11:25 am, 40 minutes before takeoff. That amount of time was perfect to wander to one end of the croissant-shaped airport wing, then to the other from there, and then back to my gate.

Because I had upgraded my seat with one of the flight packages that gave me a 30 kg luggage allowance, I ended up also getting a nice front-row seat out of the deal. I was asked during check-in if I wanted an aisle or window seat, and when I said aisle as always, I ended up with seat 1C on the plane, right in the first row and in the slightly quieter section with a small (and ineffective) privacy curtain between us and the actual economy section, and a larger one between us and the staff area at the front of the plane. That being said, it was still a fairly hectic part of the aircraft since plenty of people passed by my seat on the way to the front toilet.

I also purchased a plushie from the in-flight catalogue. There were two of them and I was kinda tempted to get both but the top one was more awesome-looking and seemed to be more like a limited edition one since it features the zodiac horse. And the horse is riding a plane! Check out this thing! He cost 49 yuan or $10 CAD.

The back of the packaging he came in seems to indicate that he was a 2014 model though — the last time there was a Chinese Year of the Horse, hah.

They didn’t actually have a way to make the payment work due to a lack of cellular service, unlike when I bought my other in-flight plushie this trip from Peach Airlines and their system just stored the credit card data until we landed. Instead they said that someone would come and find me for payment once we landed.

Kel also mentioned that on domestic flights there was usually a police officer that flew with the plane and was usually near the front, but I didn’t ever see one from my vantage point, only three flight attendants in the little cubby hole up front managing the privacy curtains between us and the front lavatory.

The plane ride was nice and smooth otherwise. It did get stuck on the runway for awhile and even though it was a 12:05 pm flight it wasn’t until 12:49 pm that our plane actually went wheels up and took off into the air, but I just used that extra time to have a short power nap instead. And there was an engine buzzing noise, similar to a lawnmower, as we ascended, but it disappeared after that and did not reappear for the rest of the trip. The plane touched down in Shanghai at 2:45 pm, and they finished the transaction for the plushie while the airport ground crew were figuring out the doors, and then I had the honour of being the first passenger off the airplane for the first time ever. Not that that meant much since I still had to wait for baggage claim, although that too was really quick for some reason, no more than a couple minutes of waiting.

Shanghai struck me as a really quiet city while I was on my way to the hotel in my Didi — there were no honking signs here and there, sure, but that didn’t explain why I heard maybe one quick horn every couple of minutes at most, and even that was only when we delved into the more chaotic downtown district. I asked Gemini about this and was told that while other cities like Guangzhou had rules against it too, enforcement was weak, whereas here in Shanghai they allegedly have acoustic cameras armed to the teeth with microphones that can detect honking intruders and charge a fine directly to their license plate. Amazing. I’m a fan. It’s so much more like a normal western city here, just from that one change alone.

I reached my hotel at around 4 pm, noting that it was set a bit back from the road, behind a hospital, which would deaden any potential honking noises even further:

The room itself looked like this:

The toilet itself lacks a sink, but there’s a sink in the room itself just outside the toilet. That’s fine I guess. Better than the toilet bowl being in a separate room like that Atour hotel that I was in earlier in the trip, I suppose.

I was in for a bit of an unpleasant surprise when I opened my large luggage bag though. It turned out that the Guangzhou airport had done a scan on it and found a couple of lithum batteries that I had forgotten about — specifically the one in the DJI Pocket 2 and the spare battery for it that I had. I had completely forgotten about them because I had not used them this trip at all, and had not even seen them when I was repacking my bag as they were buried somewhere deep inside under something else. The lock for my bag was inside a Ziploc bag inside my suitcase itself, along with a piece of paper saying that two lithium batteries had been removed (under camera supervision) and were being kept in Guangzhou airport.

I had two options from there, according to the paper — they would hold the items for 7 days, and I could either have it shipped at my own expense somewhere on mainland China, or have someone go down and pick it up from the airport. After reaching out to the airport staff, to my hotel front desk staff, and to Kel, I actually decided to try to have it shipped to my hotel instead of the slightly safer route of having it shipped to Kel, because it was only 25 yuan ($5 CAD) for shipping and because the arrival time for it would be 3-5 days, whereas I would be at this hotel for 4 days and change.

But most importantly, the hotel said that if it arrived after I left, they would hold it for me and let me forward it somewhere else, and at that point I could get a courier to pick it up and send it back to Kel instead. Due to that, and due to this being a proper, formal hotel, I decided to risk the $5 on the camera making it back to me before I leave. If not, oh well, it would be a little annoying but I don’t think I’ll actually end up losing the item either, I just won’t see it for a couple more months. And I guess I get a rare piece of paper ephemera out of this to scan. It’s annoying, but there are no memories attached to that thing or anything, since I hadn’t used it, which is the most important thing. The camera itself is a bit pricey but also about to become outdated soon with a new DJI model release, from what I’ve heard.

After that annoyance, I ventured out of the hotel to look for some food as I hadn’t eaten all day. This hotel I booked is in the downtown district, and the Didi car had passed a large dome-like shopping centre on the way here, so that’s where I went. It turned out that there was a long second-level pedestrian walkway, hovering over the roads below, and connecting a cluster of several shopping malls including this domed one, which was called Metro City.

For now, I left off exploring the walkway and went into this mall to explore it. The second-level entrance to this mall cut right through the middle of a Starbucks, giving it a ton of foot traffic.

And the mall itself, which was seven or eight storeys tall, was very busy in general, while also having really narrow corridors. I actually disliked this mall quite a bit due to that, and due to the high prices of food and things in general.

There were a whole bunch of Japanese restaurants on the bottom floor, along with a couple of anime/comic/gacha shops.

And an Imagine Dragons popup shop on the seventh floor:

I don’t care about them though. But I did care about these brochures that I found on the 6th floor, which reminded me of those Japanese chirashi movie posters, except these were for theatre plays.

I ended up eating at a busy, overpriced, and rather dirty restaurant called Benbang Fuhe Noodles:

Oddly this restaurant did not have the QR code on a table for online ordering, I actually had to make my order at the cashier (by pointing at what I wanted on the sign) and then I was given a lighthouse number tag for the chef to deliver the dish to me later once it was done cooking.

While this dish, their Signature Shrimp and Eel Noodles, felt overpriced for how much I got, I will not deny that it tasted decent at least, and putting some food in the belly definitely helped. Everything in this mall was pricey and packed regardless, so this was a good compromise nonetheless.

I walked around the rest of the mall after that and popped into a few stores, but did not end up buying anything. Hello, bear.

I then spent time walking around outside, as the temperature slowly dropped and made me thankful for having my windbreaker jacket with me. As the sun set, Shanghai’s downtown began to light up with the bright neon lights that I love so much:

Okay, maybe not that last one. Different kind of bright lights. I did wander in and out of a couple malls though since many of them were interconnected by the second level walkways, and in at least one case the walkway led into a mall and then continued on the other side. The other main mall I ended up partially exploring here was called Huijin Square:

Although I never went upstairs to look at the shops, since there was a supermarket downstairs (aptly called Huijin 600 Supermarket):

It honestly wasn’t a very good supermarket as it felt kind of sparse in places, and so there weren’t many patrons around as well, although I’m guessing not many people come to the middle of a commercial district to do grocery shopping. They had a weird fresh foods section that looked like a little sub-shop of its own (and also reminded me of Costco back in Edmonton):

And I enjoyed the various weird translations plastered up on the walls here:

I bought some weird-flavoured snacks back home to eat, and also these chocolate milk bottles that I found from the same brand as the coconut and strawberry ones that I shared with Kel over the past few days:

More cute horse (and penguin, but I only bought the horse) bottles! My entire haul looked like this at the end of the evening, with the fruits theer being a complimentary gift from the hotel itself:

This specific mall actually had a guy in a business suit holding the door open for people to enter and leave the mall, which I guess is a sign of how upscale the mall is. I left, nodding politely to him, and took the walkway network back to the stairs down to the street nearest to my hotel, which was only about a two or three minute walk in the cold. Very convenient.

There was one last amusing surprise waiting for me back at the hotel, which was that I ended up sharing the elevator with a robot that was trying to deliver an item up to the fifth floor:

It politely waited for me to enter the elevator, and then wirelessly connected to the system to hold the door open as it rolled in, and then activated the floor that it needed to go to. It wasn’t much of a conversationalist though and remained silent to my japes as the elevator ascended, just looking at me with its innocent eyes.

I got off before it and watched the doors close on my silent new friend before I retired to my room for the night. The room is actually really comfortable, which was good because I have a crick in my neck, either from carrying my bags or from falling asleep in a weird posture on the airplane, and I lazed back in bed after my shower, working on my blog and watching a television channel about video games that alternated between old League of Legends broadcasts and a man and woman playing and commentating on random Chinese games on Steam and elsewhere that I had never heard of. You know, since I also get a buffet breakfast every morning with this booking, maybe I’ll just spend my entire Shanghai holiday safe inside here.