Landing in Shanghai

The Shanghai Experience till now has been a great one. I really liked the place. It is very clean and planned. Thats the short of what my time here till now have been. Now getting into the details. :)

The First day
We landed at the Pudong International Airport on time. The local time being around 4:15 pm. The first act being to find the baggage. That was easy. All basic stuff which have now kind of become standard at international airports. After collecting the baggage, we went through the queue for the immigration check. The police officer on duty went through the documents and had only one question. "Where is the hotel address?" Locked safe in my baggage I told him. And he was kind of fine with that. Apparently, the hotel would have to register my passport number with the local police within 48hrs of my checkin. Hmm possibly the reason why he was asking for the hotel address.

The next was to get a cell phone. I had heard that it was possible to get a pre-paid card at the airport. So we went hunting for it. After a couple of minutes, we did not find anything written in English so we headed for the information desk. The lady at the desk informed us that the mobile cards were available on the next counter. She also gave us directions to the taxi area and also told us that the approximate charge for the ride would be 100 - 150 RMB. So at the next counter, we got ourselves a pre-paid card for 150 RMB with 50 RMB talk time. Great. Even more amazing was that they did not ask us to fill any forms or ask for any id proofs! Wow. I was glad that I was going to save on international roaming! But do remember that this number is charged for incoming calls too. 

Anyways, next we were looking for a map when we run into a couple of "helpful" fellows. They ask us where we want to go etc. and after looking at the address says that they can provide us with very cheap taxi rates of about 400 RMB to our hotel. WoW! Thanks information desk lady! We scooted out of that area as soon as we could. 

It took us some time to figure out where exactly the taxi point was, but we eventually made it to the area and got into one. We had a chinese version of the address that we were showing. This is very much needed here since very few folks know to read English. The cab driver was a cool guy who took us on a metered taxi and it cost us about 150 RMB for the trip. 
 

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