When I woke up this morning, I decided to sleep just a touch longer. Remember that today is a travel day, so this choice was flirting with disaster. I consciously made it anyway.
That got me into an Uber at 6:08am for my 8:15am flight. Not catastrophic, but definitely uncomfortable. This driver had also never picked up/dropped off anyone at Aulani. He was also impressed. Maybe I’ll send this info to the resort. “2 out of 2 Uber drivers are impressed with Aulani from the outside.” That should probably go on the website.
The Uber driver was a champ and made really great time to the airport, but that still put me there at 6:30am, only an hour and forty-five minutes early. I don’t stress too much about arriving early for a flight in general, but I do prefer to be a solid two hours early for an international flight. That’s right! I’m headed out of the country for the first time this trip.
My airline was Chinese Eastern Airlines, but I got out of the car at, I think it was, “China Airlines” or something like that. They are not the same airline. So I started running around in circles and screaming. Or maybe I just asked a passing airport employee where I could find the right airline. Who can say?
It was far away. So, I’m booking it past counters and counters of airlines. 15 minutes later (not an exaggeration), I run out of counters and there is still no Chinese Eastern Airlines counter in sight. I thought that I was in the right place, so I found a security person and asked and, yes, I was indeed in the right place. The counter for that airline just wasn’t open yet (and so their name wasn’t showing on the monitors above their section of counter). Confused, I started to ask how that was possible, but I glanced at the time on my email confirmation for this flight again. The flight departure time was 10:10am!!!
I’ve since checked many places in my email and travel documents and have no idea where I saw that 8:15am time. In any case, it worked out okay, because I was suddenly three and half hours early for my flight. I would have enjoyed another two hours of sleep in a real bed before going back into travel mode, but I’m not going to complain about this one.
So, my destination. I’m going to Shanghai Disneyland! (Here's a sneak peek because there aren't any pictures to go along with today.)
I decided to add a Disney park to this trip and considered my options in Asia and decided (for uninteresting reasons) to go with Shanghai. The main challenge here is that Shanghai is in actual China (as opposed to Hong Kong, which is obviously in pretend China). Real China, however, has a lot more hoops to jump through to get in.
But! Over the past several years, new rules have been introduced that happen to apply to my trip. I won’t go into all of the details of those rules, but, for you, I’m willing to go over those another time if you’d like. The result is that I can stay in the Shanghai area for up to 144 hours (6 days) without a visa! Hurrah.
I was able to check in for my flight once the counter opened. I made it onto the plane with no issues. I had downloaded both seasons of 13 Reasons Why onto my iPad last night at the hotel, which worked out perfectly, because I binged the rest of the first season and somewhere in there, I...