Wednesday 9 May 2018
An early start to the day, which we found out was to be a continuing theme on some days.
We left home at 6:30am and made good time to the airport. No problems checking in. My usual problem with border control, this is the third time traveling with my new passport, and once again the bio-metrics didn’t recognise me and I had to be “manually” processed.
Although the flight left a half hour late, we made good time. A good flight with good Stewards and Stewardesses.
Once we arrived and were “processed”, needing to have both hands, all four fingers and thumbs of both hands electronically fingerprinted, as well as a mug shot. We then proceeded to the next immigration checkpoint. Once again, photo taken and the left hand fingerprinted, how the hell they thought that we could switch identities in a walk of about 200metres is beyond, but anyway, welcome to China.
Then onto collect our luggage, so not too much waiting as it had taken us so long to be processed.
After luggage collection it was out into the terminal, where we saw many signs with peoples names on them. I was looking for something with Trip a Deal on it and spied a flag (or pennant) in the Trip a Deal colours, a few people back from those holding the other signs, so we were good. We made ourselves known to the pennant bearer, who introduced himself as Thomas who would be our guide for this area of China, who directed us to an area (coffee shop) where others were waiting having got their bags sooner than us.
Meeting up turned out to be quite the hassle, as many didn’t see Thomas holding up the flag. So some went straight outside, and once outside you cannot come back in, unless you go through the check in process as if you were going to fly out – what a hassle. One couple of ladies just stayed at the baggage collection area, just plain dumb. So for the last two, we were hanging around for an extra 45 minutes with everyone’s patience wearing thin.
So we flew into Pudong Airport one of two in Shanghai, but we were not staying in Shanghai tonight, we had another 2 hours on the bus to the Nanya Hotel in Suzhou, arriving there at 10:30pm, and getting to our room at 11:00pm
A really hard bed, which both Win and I felt very comfortable sleeping in, although there were some complaints the next morning