Friday, October 5 at 9 am Shanghai time

Hi!

We made it to Shanghai! Unfortunately, we only have 30 minutes to meet our guide, and so this has got to be short. I won't have time to post any pictures.

By the way, if there's a formatting problem, I apologize for that. When we logged into the website (blogger.com) to add this post, the website shows up in Chinese and so we can't exactly see what we're doing.

We just got done with breakfast. Chinese breakfasts - at least in nice hotels - are awesome. The buffet is the best that I have had at any hotel located anywhere. It was great.

After breakfast, we talked with our kids and my (Gord's) parents by webcam. It was great seeing them because we miss having them here!

The trip here was uneventful, fortunately. We left Grand Rapids at 12 noon and arrived in Detroit. We then traveled from Detroit to Tokyo (about 12 hours). Fortunately, we had a row of seats to ourselves - 4 seats for the 3 of us. That was huge because it gave us some space - especially for a guy as tall as I am. It also allowed Stacie to stretch out and sleep some of the time. Sue was able to sleep somewhat, and I slept very little.

The only glitch on the way to Tokyo was that one of the lens in my glasses happened to fall out. Fortunately, one of the flight attendants was able to use her hair clip as a screwdriver to tighten the screw. I know that Northwest gets a lot of bad press, but this flight attendant was very helpful. Not having a lens in my glasses for my left eye would have been a pain to deal with, especially when we were only 1/2 of the way there.

After arriving in Tokyo, we had a layover for about 2 hours. That allowed us to stretch out a bit. We then had a full flight from Tokyo to Shanghai. That flight was about 3.25 hours or so, and everything went smoothly.

After clearing customs and immigration, we got our bags and met our guide Julie and the driver Mr. Lee. Our hotel (Holiday Inn) is in downtown Shanghai, and that's about a 45 minute drive from the airport. So Mr. Lee drove Julie and us to the hotel last night in a minivan and dropped us off. We got into the hotel at 10 pm or so Shanghai time. (By the way, Shanghai time is 12 hours ahead of Michigan time.)

The Holiday Inn is quite nice - especially the lobby. The rooms are more or less an average hotel room - nothing special, but still pretty good. The area around the Holiday Inn seems quite busy - lots of Americanized stuff, like a KFC and McDonald's - and we will explore that later on.
We've also got to go to the local supermarket and get some stuff like water. It's very hard to remember not to using water from the faucet when you're brushing your teeth - you just get used to rinsing your mouth with faucet water and that's a hard habit to break. Fortunately I remembered to use the bottled water this morning and hopefully that will continue. Two years ago I forgot to use the bottled water and then later on got a little sick, probably from doing that.

Today's a big day for sightseeing. We're hitting the main highlights with Julie and Mr. Lee, and won't be back until after dinner. We'll fill you in on that next time.

Okay, I've got to run. Sorry about the lack of pictures but we'll try to post some next time.

Gord