Day 1, Travel Day: Troubles with the 144-Hour Visa-Free Transit, but here we go anyways!
(Carried on to Day 2 in travel)
Our flight out of Edmonton was to leave at 7am. (Then the final arrival time into Shanghai was scheduled for 4:20 pm local time.) Which means we were looking to be at the airport by around 4, 4:30. Normally, I’m okay arriving not-too-early, but the thing about our no-visa made me worried so personally, I wouldn’t mind arriving a little bit earlier. Anyways! Our plan was to meet super early to get a breakfast together before our flights, sleep on the flight from Edmonton to Vancouver, rest during our layover, then sleep for the first half of the flight from Vancouver to Shanghai, and stay awake for the second half. That way, we would have mimicked a night’s sleep and be awake for Shanghai morning (still on the airplane) and then when we arrive in the late afternoon, have energy to go! Jenna and I both decided that we would stay up and not nap before leaving. I spent my night doing last minute deep cleaning of our place so that we could return from our trip to a clean place with no worries. Glendon decided he wanted to nap before leaving. Which meant I did all the cleaning. It was exhausting! Long story short, everything kind of got backed up and we all ended up leaving a little bit later than anticipated. We got picked up, and we were all headed to the airport! (We decided to skip the sit-down breakfast and just grab something to eat at the airport after we get checked in.)
We arrived just after 4:30am to the airport. Oops, definitely running a little bit late. But it should be okay, not too many people flying at this time, right? Anyways, we all head up to a kiosk to do our check in. Pleas scan in your passport. Passports scanned in. Please scan in your visa. No Visa. And of course, this is what prints off out of the kiosk…
Not to worry just yet… Jenna and Brian get the same result when they try to check in. Ahh, we probably should have just gone to the desk to begin with. So while waiting in line, of course my anxiety levels are elevating… so I ask Glendon “You CALLED Air Canada right? They said it’s not a problem???” To which he said “it should be fine”
When we got to the front of the line, since we had different booking numbers, Jenna and Brian went off to a different agent than we did. So we present the receipt to our agent, and he gets our info. Flips through our passports to look for a Visa. “You didn’t apply for a visa? Where is your visa? You need a visa to get into China.”
“We are doing the 144-hour Visa-free transit! We are only there for 4 days and then we are headed to Japan after. Here is our travel information.” Long story short… our agent didn’t believe us that we could travel to China visa-free for 144 hours. He basically refused to check us in onto our flight to Vancouver, transfer to Shanghai. I did so much research, so honestly I was getting pretty frustrated with dealing with our agent. We explained the whole thing, if we travel specifically to Shanghai, stay for less than 144 hours and head off to another country after, we can be in Shanghai without a Visa for the duration of the 144 hours. The agent helping Jenna and Brian was trying to figure it out, and he came over to our agent to see if he was making any progress. Our agent basically said to theirs… “They CANNOT travel like this. They HAVE to have a Visa to get into the country. You can’t check them in.” Their agent said it’s okay, he’s just trying to find it on their system at the moment, worst comes worse just check us through and we can apply for an emergency Visa in China. But because our agent didn’t have anything, he ended up going back to his counter to figure it out there. Then OUR agent starts telling us he has to cancel our flights, because he won’t check us in. He will not let us get to Shanghai. STOP STOP STOP!!! We show him the info from the Chinese embassy website that we looked up, he tells us it doesn’t matter what the Chinese embassy says, it’s not on his system. I had to leave the counter because guaranteed I would have started yelling. Literally he refused any of our research. I was sleep deprived, and this was way more difficult than any of us anticipated. So Glendon basically asked him if he could just check us in on our flight to Vancouver, and we will do this again in Vancouver. Because for sure, we had talked to the people at customs in Vancouver and they said this was fine. So our agent basically told us whatever, if we get stuck in Vancouver that’s our problem not Air Canada’s. Please make sure you understand Air Canada will NOT be paying for any emergency flights back home, etc. So he’s in the process of doing just this… and luckily at this moment Jenna and Brian’s agent came over. So our agent tells him “I’m only letting them get to Vancouver. They said they’ll figure their way out there” but how lucky… the other agent found it on their system. It was a teeny tiny little thing, but there it was… 144-hour visa-free transit through Shanghai’s International Airport. So they read it together… and our agent starts making his arguments to the other agent that we can’t do that since we are flying to Japan after. So of course I’m frustrated because he didn’t read it, so I tell him, no! It’s SPECIFICALLY because we are going to another country after! That’s what they mean by visa-free TRANSIT. To which he asked me if I was yelling at him, because I’m sure he would have loved to have banned me off of flying. Oh my god. Go away. You literally would NOT listen to us, you literally are not trying to HELP us. The entire time you are just arguing that we are wrong and you will not help, you didn’t even try to look. Their agent tried. And found it. And now you’re going to argue HIM even though THERE IT IS? Oh my god. So … since he accused me of yelling at him, and I instantly went into panic mode, afraid he wanted to ban me or put me on a high-watch list… I apologized for sounding like I had raised my voice. I’m sorry, I am starving (because we had anticipated that we would already have had breakfast by this time…) AND I haven’t slept yet. So then, I backed off. And finally, FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY we got fully checked in.
[Now that it’s been so long since this incident happened… I guess if you really think about it, all of Air Canada’s flights not THAT many out of Edmonton would be going towards Shanghai as its final destination. And let’s be real here, most people who are going will have gotten their visa. So I GUESS… I GUESS it’s understandable that we faced some difficulties with our check in. But I think that overall the most frustrating thing was that our agent actually refused to help us, which is something I have NEVER experienced in all of my travels. I’m pretty sure if we were with any other agent I would not have gotten so infuriated so early on in our trip. Even Brian was saying “I can’t believe your agent!” GUH. Anyways. That is over now. At the time, I had made it very obvious that I was looking for his name tag, to make him think “YES, I WILL be calling Air Canada on YOU Mr. whoever-you-are” … To be honest I wasn’t ACTUALLY going to call on him, I just wanted him to think it so maybe he wouldn’t treat someone else this way heh. Anyways! Carrying on…]
Alas, by this time, the line up for security got HUGE, and we were already cutting it close to boarding time. When I got up to security and they scanned in my boarding pass, the lady spent a little longer looking at my boarding pass than she did any of the rest of us. I was definitely a little bit worried that I indeed got put onto the list of heavy screening passengers by our agent! Because I also got pulled aside for a pat down… but then nothing happened after that, phew. So finally we made it through security, and got to our gate, right as they started boarding. I was very sad that we didn’t get a chance to buy anything to eat. The last time that I had eaten anything was around 6pm the night before, and now it’s 7am and it’s flight time. But I guess… I can’t complain too much… we are actually on our way. I was secretly blaming my no-breakfast on our agent who didn’t want to help us.
To further my sadness… our plane needed to get de-iced.
(Honestly I’ve never really watched this before so I guess it was kind of cool…)
Finally, we have officially started our day of travel. We kept joking that if for some reason, this 144-hour visa-free transit thing fails us, we would just buy a ticket to Tokyo from Shanghai and skip Shanghai, and do extra days in Tokyo. It’s not exactly the worst thing to be able to have more time in Tokyo haha. (Secretly I hated this idea. I REALLY wanted to see the new Shanghai park…) So! Entire plane ride to Vancouver, all I could think about was “as soon as get to Vancouver, we have to go to our gate agent to make sure this 144-hour thing is real and that there won’t be a problem.” Luckily, I still managed to sleep on the 1.5 hour flight.
Fun fact… I lived in Vancouver for 6 years, so any time I fly into, or out of Vancouver, I always look out the window. Back when I DID live in Vancouver, I flew home to Edmonton all the time to see my family. Anyways, I always look out the window, because I always look for my 10-story apartment building from the skies. And I can usually see it! But not this day… I guess I don’t remember the landscape as well as I used to haha. Plus new buildings get built like legos every year in Vancouver. Anyways… bitter sweet memories.
OKAY so local time, 7:45am arrived in Vancouver. Thoughts on my mind… see gate agent, food. We made our way from the domestic terminal over to the international side to our gate, so that we could get our worries out first… it’s empty. No agent, no nothing. Our plane is here though! Probably arrived late last night. So… since there was no agent we decided it was time to hit up an airport lounge so we can eat and have a bit of a rest. Our flight doesn’t leave until 12:20pm, so that was plenty of time for us to relax a bit. Glendon and I’s Amex card gets us into any of the airport lounges, and Jenna and Brian got some free entry passes to use up. Unfortunately, it turned out their passes were only good on the domestic side that we already passed. So we decided to split up, since I was getting rather grumpy and tired.
Ahhhhh breakfast and a view of airplanes.
Ate food, grabbed some water bottles, rested. It was a good thing we got to the lounge early, since by the time we finished eating and even rested a bit, the crowds started to come. Line up for food and drinks, and all the comfy seats around us were now filled. When it started to get loud, we decided we could probably head back to the gate.
Here is our airplane! A Boeing 787.
We’ve never flown a 787, so we were pretty excited.
ANDDDDD our gate agent said it’s no worries, as long as we have both our hotel info in Shanghai and our flight info to our next destination, we will have no problems when we get to China. Wow that was much better. What a difference it is when you have direct flights to Shanghai, and TONS of Chinese visitors in Vancouver. He said TONS of people have done it, so we have nothing to worry about. He also told us that the flight was only 20% full. WHOO what good news! Basically an empty flight. I feel like this never happens haha.
Some Vancouver airport shenanigans:
Just kidding, we didn’t actually play, we were just going to the washroom when we found the giant chess set up.
SO background story: my experiences with actual from-China-Chinese people so far… honestly, I grew up in Edmonton and my parents put me in mandarin bilingual school all through grade school, so I got to learn all the history of China and etc. You would think this would give me a good idea of how the Chinese people are. While my parents are also Chinese, my grandparents had left China when they first were of age to Vietnam for work and to build a life. So really, even my parents don’t have a lot of experience with the China-Chinese. Since they grew up in Vietnam, my grandparents wanted them to grow up with proper manners so that the Vietnamese would have a good impression of hard working Chinese people. Anyways my parents were part of the generation of people fleeing Vietnam when the communists came and took over. All that hard work my grandfather put in to build a good life for his family? Yeah that ended up meaning nothing in Vietnam by the time the communists came and took over. Hence how they ended up in North America. Anyways, where I am going with this is, I have never experienced how true-Chinese people are, since I was born and raised in North America by parents who grew up with proper manners. SO my first experience of the China-Chinese would have been when I went on a school trip to China in high school. My parents decided what a good opportunity, and they ended up coming on the trip as additional chaperones. (Most other kids thought their parents coming on a school trip would be lame. But I actually think my parents are rather cool. My friends liked my parents too, so they would rather have my parents than their own) This was back in… 2006. And basically… we had visited lots of places including big cities, tourist areas, AND some more rural places. So… squatties are indeed scary, but when you are a teenager and everyone dares you to do something, everyone does it right? SO needless to say I had my never-thought-I-would-ever-use-a-squatter experience over ten years ago, because in some places literally that is ALL that is available. So… even though they are scary, it’s also not I’ll-die-if-I-have-to-use-one. And long story a little less long… you can easily tell who the educated Chinese people are, and who the country-side Chinese people are. And there actually is a difference, there are ones who were properly educated to have good manners and treat others with respect as opposed to rudely. But because the population of China is SO HUGE… well… percentage wise, the rude definitely over power the not-rude. And I work with a few of Chinese people at work, and they HATE the ones that aren’t educated because it gives China such a bad reputation. Which of course, for Glendon, Jenna, and Brian, all these horror stories they’ve heard from other people had them super not-excited. (We didn’t have TOO bad of experiences in Shanghai… I’m just telling these stories for reference of our mind set going in to China haha)
SO!!!! Here we go! We have boarded the flight, and true to our gate agent’s word, the plane was rather empty. When you board, the flight crew ask you to sit in your assigned seats just at the beginning so that they can keep track of who is on the plane, make sure that families who booked together haven’t lost their seat to someone who wanted an entire row to themselves, etc. Luckily, there already wasn’t anyone in the seat next to me so Glendon and I had the middle section of our row to ourselves. (787’s economy seating are 3-3-3.) Glendon chose middle instead of either of the sides with the windows because he’s an aisle seat guy and to him, this was fantastic because if I needed to use the washroom I wouldn’t have to bother him to get out haha.
Here is my first “omg China” experience already on the airplane!
The guy sitting behind me surprised me when I was leaning back and suddenly there was a red socked foot in disposable slippers right next to me in the aisle!!! At first I thought omg how rude you can’t just stick your feet into the aisle!! People need to walk past and hellooooo I do NOT want to be sitting next to your foot this entire plane ride. Luckily, he only did that for a little bit and was courteous for the remainder of the flight. And in the end I actually thought, oh how thoughtful actually, to wear disposable slippers. Because your feet get pretty swollen especially on such a long flight. How comfortable that must be.
Anyways! Then my second shocker!
This lady had taken out an instant noodle bowl. I did not realize this was a thing. But apparently it is. I was eavesdropping when she asked the flight attendant in mandarin if she could get some hot water for it. The flight attendance said no problem and went and did it. I guess it’s normal! We definitely didn’t think that was a thing haha.
Selection of movies and shows were pretty decent on the flight, and Glendon was happy he had lots of choices. Since I had a small sleep on my earlier flight, I didn’t feel like I definitely needed to sleep right then and there, even though I knew I probably should. SO for my movie choice I decided to watch Girl on the Train. I had read the book, but I didn’t really enjoy it that much. I didn’t think it was spectacular. But for some reason when a book gets made into a film I always feel like I should probably watch it. Umm, if you haven’t watched Girl on the Train… don’t do it on the airplane when you have an aisle seat LOL. Why? Umm… there are quite a few sex scenes that I did NOT know were in the movie.
And here we go… my first meal on the flight:
Meal is Chicken with mustard thyme sauce with a couscous salad. I generally take pictures of my meals when on vacation… even my airplane food. This is because I have a dairy allergy and for some reason I think it’s neat to see what different options there are. Note: I’m sure if you have bad allergies you’ll have done this before. But for those who didn’t know, you let your airline know in advance of allergies. Air Canada doesn’t have a full dairy-allergy option, but they do have lactose-free. So I got that and pray there’s no butter or other milk proteins in large quantities in the rest of the stuff. I think it’s safe enough, anyways. The brownie is a vegan brownie so that’s for sure safe. And they didn’t give me butter, but margarine for the bread. Which I actually didn’t even get on my first meal haha. Also, when you put on a dietary notice for your food… you actually get your food before they start rolling out the trays. So if you like to have your food earlier… you can always choose a kosher option, or something else.
Here is Glendon’s food. I think he chose… a… beef with rice option?
His meal came with an actual brownie, and a bean salad thing that he did not like at all. I cheated and wanted to try it because it smelled kind of balsamic like. I think it’s supposed to be some sort of greek inspired bean salad? Glendon doesn’t really like that kind of stuff so he didn’t have it.
Overall, since you never have huge expectations of airplane food, especially in economy… our food ended up being not too bad. I saved the brownie for later, because I knew that’s a safe snack in case of future emergency “Jessica about to get real HANGRY” moments during our trip.
After our meal was nap time. They dimmed the lights in the cabin so most people were sleeping. I’m going to assume everyone either were like us and stayed up all the night before, or took some sleeping pills because most of the people on the plane were sleeping. Then it was second meal time! (For some reason I didn’t expect a second meal. But turns out you get a meal, a snack, a second meal, another snack, and a sandwich lunch haha. I guess this is the standard for a 12 hour flight)
The lactose-free meal:
Chicken with Chimichurri Sauce. Lactose-free bean salad. Vegan brownie. And this time, a bun!
And Glendon’s fried rice meal:
Overall they weren’t the worst meals we’ve ever had. And in terms of airplane food, again not bad. Except my bun. That was pretty icky, so I didn’t eat that. But hey this time I got my own bean salad haha. And another vegan brownie that got put away as a future snack!
I don’t remember what our between-meal snacks were. I think probably pretzels. The kinds that aren’t like the usual kinds you get at the bars, but kind of… crispier? Anyways I think we liked them haha. I got a wrap instead of a sandwich for my “lunch” meal about an hour before landing, and Glendon got to choose a sandwich. But he just said no thanks instead (not huge on sandwiches)
This was the instructions side of our customs declaration card.
“Aliens” made me laugh so I had to take a photo
Which means… it’s that time!!! Shanghai, we are HERE. And luckily, we even arrived a little bit earlier than our 4:20pm arrival time. In the end, while we did get some sleep, none of us slept all that much. I think we were all experience a mixture of excitement, anxiousness, and nervousness? Too many emotions! Also… right next to us at our arrival gate was a HUGE DOUBLE DECKER PLANE! I’ve never seen one before so I thought this was SO COOL! I’ve only seen the ones where only the front has the upper seating, so a full double decker was just mind blowing to me haha.
After waiting a little bit for our bags and picking them up… it was finally that time for our moment of truth. Getting into China time. We were a little bit nervous, but we also saw the booth for applying for an emergency visa… so I guess it wasn’t too bad. Then the customs and immigrations area was pretty busy. And so we walked up to ask someone about the line for 144 hours. I’m not sure if the guy understood us, but he DID direct us away from where the majority of the people are.
Oops, I wasn’t supposed to take a picture since it’s technically still a customs area. But as you can see in the photo… there is no one here. We were laughing a little bit. There’s also smaller areas for the 24 hour transit, and the 72 hour transit. Anyways, it ended up being super super easy. We showed then our passports, our declaration cards, our hotel booking, and our next flight out to Japan. They basically scanned them in, and the hotel does all the police work stuff for us. I think if you don’t have a hotel booked, what you have to do first is go to a police station to register your visit or something. That part I am not too sure about since we did indeed have a hotel booked haha.
Oh. My. God. All that morning’s frustrations just flew out the window when we literally got through in a breeze with literally NO line up. SO officially, we have made it into Shanghai! And off we go to find ourselves a taxi to get us to Toy Story Hotel! We were just a tad bit worried about finding a legit cab service that isn’t going to scam us. In the end… we’re pretty sure we got hustled by a sort-of-Engish-speaking lady who had on an official looking uniform that said she was airport security and helping us avoid scams… Where are you headed? Okay here is an official slip receipt. 500 yuan cash. Thank you! … Unlabelled car… omg we’re pretty sure we got hustled into a cab scam. Because 500 yuan is basically 100 Canadian dollars. But at the time we were just OH OKAY and we didn’t immediately think it through until we got led to an unlabelled car. But at least… the guy understood we were going to Toy Story Hotel at Disney… and his car didn’t have any dents or scratches on it. AND it ended up being kind of a fun ride as we experienced a true Chinese car ride haha. Honks and zips and weaves and all. (Yeah… later on when we ACTUALLY booked a cab officially from the hotel we definitely knew we got scammed. But I guess at this time we waved it off…) The drive into the Disney resort area was actually pretty interesting. Well, mostly because we were just “OMG is this real? Are we really in China now? IS THIS ACTUALLY ACTUALLY HAPPENING?” Yeah it still hadn’t hit us: We are in China.
And here we are… the entrance to Toy Story Hotel!
It’s all cartoony and cute haha. Made to look like a toy box haha.
Up next to come… Photos of our room, first impressions
