We landed in Shanghai domestic airport, a mere hour and a half flight from Xiamen, we departed the convenience of air travel and deep dove into one of most largest China’s cities. We were lucky enough (thanks to the kind help from George) to be picked up from the airport by his friend Zhao and his lovely wife. We arrived at the apartment where we would stay for the next few days in Shanghai, George’s uncles were waiting for us, with fresh dumplings and a great smile. With some English explanations, and some of Google Translate’s help, we got the gist how things work around the place, received some way points around the neighborhood and this is it, we were on our own.
First struggle was to realize we forgot to set up some things in advance. Firstly, there is no Google in China. At all. For us, Google dependents, it means no email and no maps. With the poor help of Bing, which defaults to full Chinese when you connect from mainland China, I managed to set up an ExpressVPN on the phone, tablet and laptop. But the internet connection sucked. Only in one corner of the apartment there was good enough WIFI reception that you can actually have a stable connection. Oh well, we’ll survive.
The second thing we should have taken care of is to make sure our Canadian SIM cards are allowed for roaming, this is critical to be able to connect to most public WIFI in China as they require you to authenticate with a text message PIN. Since our phones were not able to connect to the local network, we could not have received anything, calls or text messages. M called Virgin via Skype, it took 10 minutes to explain to the representative what we want, then she transferred us to the proper queue. We gave up after 40 minutes on the line. Sigh, Virgin…we are no happy customers of yours.
Jet lag surely contributed, but we were exhausted by 6pm that day. We all took a shower and went straight to bed. We woke up early the next morning, and our continuous journey of learning China was about to start.
