Seoul to Shanghai

Well, it's Saturday and I'm sitting here in my boxer shorts, hungry and bleary-eyed. My journals are sitting in a heap near my elbow and haven't been updated since we got back from Hong Kong. I have to go get cat litter at some point today and start packing up the guest room for reasons I shall make apparent at the proper time. 

Time to start telling you about my massive 3.5-week trip through Southeast Asia, I guess.

Travel Truth #1: When it comes to cheap flights on cheap airlines, you get what you pay for.

China's answer to Singapore's Scoot and Ireland's Ryanair is China Eastern. I don't know if they intended it to be that way, but it is. For a pittance they'll fly your ass all over the eastern Orient. I booked them for a flight from Seoul to Hanoi, Vietnam, on the 12th of July. To get the best deal, though, I had to accept an eleven-hour overnight layover in Shanghai, a four-hour layover in Kunming, and a mere 40-minute layover in Nanning before the final hop to Vietnam. 

Not the most desirable itinerary, right? There was a silver lining, though. Shanghai has this thing called 72-hour visa-free transit, wherein the Chinese government—in a rare moment of magnanimity—decided to allow foreigners from 51 countries enter the cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Chengdu, Shanghai, or Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) for 72 hours without a visa during long layovers. What's more, I happened to have a friend in Shanghai, a hip-hop-loving New Zealander named Larry whom I knew through a mutual friend in Busan. Why not go see him and drink a few beers? Shanghai was on CNN's list of Asia's best pours, after all. And you know how I love me some craft brew.

There was a five-hour delay in my flight from Gimpo, which meant Miss H and I sat around the tiny terminal snacking on fast food and staring into each other's (crusty, bloodshot) eyes. But at eleven o'clock I finally made it off the ground. What with the time difference I landed in Shanghai at midnight (one o'clock p.m. Seoul time). I managed to get messages to Larry so he wasn't sitting around the arrival gate at Shanghai's Hongqiao Airport for four hours. He met me in due course and we grabbed a cab to the Huangpu District (Fuxing Middle Road) to have a sip at Boxing Cat Brewery.

Wikipedia's free image of the Huangpu District. That's the People's Park in the middle. 

Photo courtesy of Pilsgrimage, which did a rather lovely write-up about this place. 

Hailed as the best craft brew in China, Boxing Cat is ideally located. Huangpu used to be where all the foreign concessions were in Shanghai, and there are still a lot of foreigners living there, Shanghai being an economic powerhouse and all. Amusingly, all the brews were named in pugilistic terms: Right Hook Helles (4.5% ABV), Contender Extra Pale Ale (4.9% ABV), Suckerpunch Pale Ale (5.5% ABV), TKO India Pale Ale (6.3% ABV), etc. All heavy on the hops but hey, that's the trend. I like the maltier and wheatier beers better, but I appreciate me some hops now and then. 

Larry and I sipped a couple of tall cold ones and got caught up with each other. He'd been a teacher in Busan alongside Adam (the English mate I was going to see in Ho Chi Minh City) but he'd since moved to Shanghai, where the living was easier and the pickings were better. We shied away from politics and whatnot and focused mostly on how we'd been doing in the two or three years since we'd seen each other. The beer was good and the music was quiet, but it was already 1:00 a.m. We'd barely ordered the second round before the waitress informed us of last call. 

Now, I was already pouring sweat by the time we got to Boxing Cat. I thought Seoul got hot and humid in summer, but I'd clearly forgotten my roots: the five years I spent in the jungles of East Tennessee and the visits we made to my paternal grandparents' house near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Shanghai was even worse, a greenhouse even at midnight. After Boxing Cat slammed the door on our backs, we decided to hike through the quiet, steamy streets to find a new watering hole, and there's me with a 30-pound pack on my back in umpteen billion percent humidity and 85-degree heat. 

Wikipedia's photo of the Luwan neighborhood of Huangpu (the old French concession), the area Larry and I were traipsing through...only a lot darker and steamier. You could see the dang humidity. It filled the throat, clogged the nostrils and formed a sticky slime on the skin.

Not a breath of a breeze disturbed the filmy fog as we trudged through the damp streets to the Shanghai Brewery on Hongmei Road. This place was bigger and much better air-conditioned, resembling a proper beer hall. The brews didn't have the same depth of flavor as Boxing Cat's did, but man, the price was better. Here Larry and I talked and joked and chafed until four o'clock in the morning. The time difference really comes in handy: there was a football (soccer) game on the big projector at the front of the room. Never too late (or too early) for sports over here in the Orient. 

Larry, unbeknownst to me, had work in the morning (!), so he said adieu and good night at this juncture. He got me a cab back to Hongqiao—Terminal 1, as it happened. The international terminal. I needed Terminal 2, the domestic one, as I'd be hopping through two more Chinese airports before finally making Vietnam.

Well, I didn't know the layout of Hongqiao Airport, did I? I assumed the cabbie had dropped me off in the right spot. It was only five o'clock in the morning and check-ins for flights didn't even start up for another few hours. I spent most of the wee hours of the morning of July 13th wandering around the terminal trying to find a spot to nap. The competition was fierce. 

After a while I found an empty corner and got an hour's sleep. I woke up at six—just 80 minutes before my flight to Kunming left. It was then that the ominous warning Larry had given last night rang home: 

The cabbie might take you to Terminal 1. 

I needed Terminal 2! Que lástima! 

I scrambled to get on the inter-terminal bus, which, I was warned, would take 20 minutes. Indeed, I was shocked by how far apart the terminals were. To my foggy, hung-over brain, it was as though we'd completely left the airport and driven to a new one. You may well imagine me with my damp, sweaty clothes and unwashed hair, peering out at the muggy grey light of an overcast Shanghai morning, drumming my fingers and tapping my sandaled feet with impatience. 

I dashed off the bus and into the much larger and newer Terminal 2 and my heart sank. The lines were out the door. I shoved my way through to the automated check-in machines and tried to clock in, but the damn thing wouldn't let me. I kept getting an error message. It was already 6:45 and my flight left at 7:20. Desperate, I made my way to the service counter—and the incoherent crowd of people grouped around it—to revise my ticket. I figured it was all up with my original flight, so I planned to claim that I'd missed it and ask to be put on a later flight. I had a four-hour layover in Kunming, so as long as the Chinese were efficacious I could still be there and make my flight to Nanning in good time. 

IF the Chinese were efficacious, that is.

Efficacy, however, is not something for which the Chinese are renowned. The throng at Hongqiao was atrocious. White-shirted, black-tied clerks scrambled behind the help desk, peered over each other's shoulders at computers, ran to get supervisors, held up their hands to appease the madding crowd. The crowd in question had no rhyme or reason to it. There were no clear lines, just a muddled press of ill-tempered human bodies. The crush got so bad that one tiny Chinese man with short-cropped hair and a red-striped shirt climbed on top of his heaped luggage cart, cupped his hands to his mouth, and began to shout: 

"ARE WE FORMING A HORIZONTAL LINE HERE, PEOPLE, OR A VERTICAL ONE?!"

He repeated this about seventeen times. I know this because I happened to have a lovely middle-aged Chinese-American woman behind me with bobbed black-dyed hair and a bit too much purple eye shadow who translated for me. Her flight had been canceled and she needed a new one. She'd lived in Los Angeles for decades and was a well-established realtor. She chattered a few rapid words to the fish-faced clerk when the two of us finally battled our way to the counter, back-to-back like a master-and-pupil duo in a kung fu movie. Everything was peachy-keen after that. The harried, wall-eyed fellow behind the counter slashed a pen across a slip of paper, handed it to me, and told me to go check in at the China Eastern counter. I wished my matron good luck, and then went and waited in line a further 45 minutes—during which my original flight boarded and took off without me, or so I believed—got checked in, went through security, and was on a plane to Kunming before I knew it. 

(I later discovered that I needn't have panicked about getting to Terminal 2 on time. My original flight from Shanghai to Kunming had been canceled. Expedia sent an e-mail to my inbox, but as I hadn't been able to check it since Gimpo, I missed the memo. I would have had to do the exact same malarkey—wait in that crazy, amorphous line and check in at the front counter—that I did anyway, only I could have done it in far less of a hurry. C'est la vie, as they say in Huangpu.)