…my cuppa iced coffee…

8:30 am

I am at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) right now, about to board Malaysia Airlines flight MH338 to Shanghai for my training. This is my first travel to China and I’m quite excited about it. A bit apprehensive too, to tell you the truth but I guess that’s understandable, being first timer and all.

Okay, gotta go now. Otherwise I’ll be left behind.

5:30 pm

We touched down at Pu Dong International Airport at 2:05pm - a journey of approximately 5 hours. I slept half of the time and spent the other half watching movies. Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur are in the same time zone, so I don’t have to adjust my watch. But then, I don’t have a watch, so..

Getting through the immigration and out of the airport took us about half an hour. My colleague has already arranged the transport to take us to the place where we’ll be staying till the end of the month: New Harbour Service Apartments. Took us more than an hour to get there.

From what I have seen so far, I have to say that Shanghai is a very beautiful city. The buildings are amazing.. the streets wide and clean.. there are trees and flowers everywhere.. Everything is just great. Except for one: the haze. Yup.. the air quality is really quite bad. Everything looks hazy after 500m or so.

Anyway, I’m now sitting in front of the tv, writing this while waiting for dinner time. Fortunately.. this place has broadband services inside the apartments. Unfortunately.. I have to pay if I want to use it. It’s RMB30 per hour, with a maximum of RMB70 per day. Damn! I thought it was free.

9:45 pm

We went to a Chinese Muslim restaurant not far from the apartments. The people who can speak Mandarin are non-Muslims, so they went to have their dinner somewhere else. The rest of us don’t speak Mandarin. And to make things worse, the people at the restaurant do not speak English. So the whole thing was like chicken trying to talk to ducks. It was quite funny. In the end, we managed to get our orders through.

We had chicken curry, deep fried fish, tofu in I-dunno-what red sauce, vegetable and rice. All together it came up to RMB193, which I suppose is not really that bad. It’s probably cheaper if we order the same food in Malaysia.

So tomorrow we will start our training, and it’s going to be a whole-day affair for the next 2 weeks (not counting the weekend). The flight back to Kuala Lumpur is on Saturday, 28/06/2008. I’m hoping that the training will be completed earlier so that I can go back one day early.

In the meantime, let’s just concentrate on getting through this adventure in Shanghai. Hehehehe…

• Shanghai Noon - Update 1
• Shanghai Noon - Update 2
• There’s no place like home