Our Travel Day and Arrival in Shanghai

Traveling is always incredibly difficult, but today was by far the toughest travel day I've ever experienced. Our "day" began yesterday at 3:30 am, when my mom and I woke up to get ready for our ride to pick us up at 4 am. Each of us already didn't feel great, both my mom and I had hurting throats. Once we arrived at the airport we checked in for our Alaska Air flight to Seattle. Upon boarding the flight we realized we didn't have seats next to each other. Luckily a seat next to my mom wasn't occupied, but I was too tired to move seats.

When we arrived in Seattle I began running I fever and my mom called my doctor to decide if we needed to delay our trip a day for me to get strep tested or not. We decided not to delay our flight, as it might be too early to be diagnosed, and had breakfast before our 11.5 hour flight to Shanghai. We also stocked up on cough drops, Claritin, nuts, neck pillows, and hand sanitizer. Sitting in our gate we got a good look at both our enormous, 9 seat across, kung fu panda plane and the other passengers on the flight. My mom and I realized the extreme minority we were in. We also face timed my sister, Hannah, who is in Spain, for 40 minutes before boarding.

On the flight I slept the entire way with occasional breaks for Advil, food, water, and fever checks. Meanwhile, my mom mostly watched movies with a few hours of sleep mixed in. When we finally arrived the next two hours were getting through quarantine (luckily my fever had broken), immigration, customs, the ATMs, metro passes, the cab line, and eventually a taxi to our hotel.

When we got to our room a few things caught our immediate attention: how cold it is, the smog you can see out of our window, how small the beds are, and the strange layout of the room. I crawled straight into bed to sleep some more and my mom showered. We later went to find the nearest metro station and discovered how crowded the streets are.

Starving, we decided to find ourselves some dinner, which proved to be a struggle itself. Vegetarians don't seem to exist here, and this mixed with the language barrier became quite a challenge. We looked at three restaurants with few to no vegetarian menu items before deciding to just go to the Chinese restaurant at the hotel. Once we sat down and started looking at the menu we decided that this restaurant had even fewer options than the other we went to. We left and headed to a noodle restaurant and ordered Mushroom noodle soup, which was the only vegetarian item on the menu, they also happened to have run out. We left that restaurant and finally went to a Thai restaurant. Here the workers spoke pretty good English and we were confident when we ordered spring roles, pad thai, and another noodle dish we would have vegetarian food. I guess we were too confident because two bites into a spring role I found a piece of meat inside. Luckily our noodles didn't have meat. However, by the time we got our food we were almost too tired to eat.

Tomorrow we will get to know our surroundings and food options much better, but one thing is for sure: This trip will be a challenge.