Surviving on my own in the no-english-land

In Shanghai metro

Ah, I've beaten the great internet firewall of China! :-) As I have written earlier, China has blocked access to Google, GMail, Youtube (a Google service), Blogspot (a Google service hosting this blog) and Facebook, among other useful internet services, for "security reasons" (read: censorship of free speech to aid the communist party stay in power). This is annoying for us western visitors since we are already used to these "dangerous" services and might want to use them during our trips.
    
On my last trip here I did not do any Facebook updates because of this (and because of our busy travel schedule with Jinlin). But now I am circumventing the blockage by taking a remote-desktop connection to my home server and then browsing the net from there. Bit clumsy, but works :-) This time there's also more possibilities and time for such updates since the hectic travel schedule in rural Yunnan has been changed to staying in single well-networked hotel in Shanghai and, due to Jinlins studies, I will be much of the time without her.

I arrived to Shanghai 10 AM Chinese time yesterday. My hotel is near Jinlins school in the Shanghai suburb of Jiading, quite on opposite side of the city from the airport. I took the Shanghai metro from end of the airport metro line to the end of line 11 to North Jiading station. The size of this metropolis is conveyed by the fact that this took more than 2 hours although the the metro had good speed and did not stop very often. Too bad I had not gotten any sleep on the previous night in the plane and there were no places to sit left :-) And too bad it means I have to wake up 5 AM on the day of leaving to make it to the plane :-( 

But despite the size, the metro is otherwise well arranged with clear signs, maps and indicators. Once during the metro trip there was a branching in the line and I could not determine from the information displays which way my train was going. I do not have mental barrier of speaking clumsy Chinese, but I unfortunately do have mental barrier of asking random people for directions in any language. But got over the barrier and asked a fellow passenger ( Qing wèn.  Zhè ge  Dì tiě  Qù  Shén me  Dì fāng ? "Excuse me, what place does this metro go to?" ) and also get an answer I understood and was helpful :-) 

In Jiading I pulled my luggage 500 m from the metro station to the location of my hotel. Or rather to the location where Google maps had been marking the address of my hotel. There was only a hospital there, no hotels. Too bad I did not have the Chinese name and address of the hotel on my printed infopaper and my laptop with the additional information was out of battery. Had to do 30 minutes of more walking and asking directions from two other hotels on the road. Lots of badly spoken and badly understood Chinese was involved in these other hotels as well, especially since I mistook the second one to be my hotel and a mass of misunderstandings followed.

Finally I was directed to the right hotel where I had reservation. It was about 1 km south from the point marked by Google maps. (Note to self: Don't rely on Google maps address locations in China in future.) Final challenge was to manage the check-in discussions with the helpful but once again no-word-of-anything-but-chinese staff. Had to use quite much my catch-all phrase  ( Duì bù qǐ  .  Wo bù  Míng bái, "Sorry, I do not understand") The mutual struggle with Chinese did fortunately seem to provide the staff amusement rather than frustration judging from their laughing together when in the end even the details of the deposit-payment were understood and all was clear :-)

More pictures from the way to Jiading here.

Now I have slept 14 hours, hopefully compensated for the lost night and in a few hours I will meet Jinlin. We will not have much time together during this trip due to her tough study schedule (7 days per week) and strict policies at her university (no sleeping away from campus and no visitors). I very much wish that we can both keep any disappointment from these limitations away from our minds for the time being so that we don't waste any of our short precious moments together to bitter thoughts but focus on the present and positive things.