On the way to Spain
Our flight wasn’t supposed to leave until 3pm, but Chenbl had us meet up at the Airport Bus Station (aka the “Yes We Can’t Believe the Airport MRT Isn’t Ready Yet Either Station) at 10am. This, he believed, would let us take it nice and slow. He had no idea.
We got to the airport by 11am, meeting up with Ewan, Iris (one of my photography students) and Iris’s friend Ms. Shao. So there’s five of us on this trip. We had lunch at Mosburger (Ewan had Burger King), and made our way towards our gate in a leisurely fashion. I ran into Zhao Chuan, and we chatted a bit. The last time I saw him was after our last gig at Sappho, when we were both rather drunk. I honestly don’t know what is up with us constantly running into aging rock stars at airports. I suppose the odds are just better there.
We waited at our gate for the plane to Shanghai. And waited. And waited. A Chinese man who had an app on his phone said the plane hadn’t even left Shanghai yet for some reason. So we waited some more. The room filled with mainland Chinese tourists, and the volume level rose in purportion.
The man with the app left suddenly, just before the announcement was made that our gate was being changed. Apparently his app told him. Everyone rushed to the gate next door, and there we waited some more. Eventually the plane arrived, and we got on, only to wait some more. And hour went by, and I entertained myself by broadcasting live on Facebook from the plane. Â Another hour went by.
We didn’t take off until after 7pm, and any chance of tooling around Shanghai that day was dashed. It was raining when we arrived in any case, and by the time we had made our way through customs and immigration (we took the Chinese line as it was much shorter than the foreigner line), found the hotel agent and the (mandated by law) decrepit van to take us to the hotel, it was near 11. Nothing was open, so we ordered some dumplings from an app on Iris’ phone.
