Day 0

When I first got my tickets to Taiwan through China Eastern Airlines, I was already pretty skeptical of good service. I purchased them 3 weeks before today and the price amounted up to around $250. A little ridiculous to believe that I could get such a cheap deal near the flight day.

Well…

I know it’s difficult to put a mechanical problem on the airline, but that one mechanical problem delayed my flight by 8 hours, missing my connection by 5 hours. It provided me a lot of time to mess around with other passengers that were chill with helping me with my sloppy Korean. But we were all pretty grumpy in due time. An 아저씨 actually got livid and called the airline workers a bunch of monkeys. He went on a rampage for a solid 4 minutes. I now know what rage sounds like first-hand in Korean.

Rage aside, they finally got us a flight around 8PM and within an hour and a half, we touched down in 上海 (상하이, Shanghai). From the outside, while landing, the city looked pretty incredible. Truth be told, Shanghai was the only city in China I ever really wanted to visit. I just didn’t expect it to be like this. Since there were no connections for the rest of the night, China Eastern assured us complementary hotel accommodation. I thought that was very kind of them until I arrived at the “hotel”.

Hotels are apparently graded on a 3 letter scale of A being denoted by a smiley face to a C denoted by a frowney face. Our wonderful accommodation came with complementary ramen that made you wished you were eating sandpaper instead and extra room guests in the form of cockroaches. The stoic face of the B-grading on the hotel front started to look like it was frowning.

I thought to myself, I’ll just have to survive this for a few hours and then I can see Shanghai by sunrise before returning to the airport. That would make the layover all worth it. Well, China Eastern made sure that wouldn’t happen either by misplacing my laptop bag full of all my other important travel belongings.

Crap.

I took a taxi back immediately to see what I could do to resolve the situation. Unfortunately, I was only met with rudeness, the entirety of the time. Everything was closed and no one told me what I should do to resolve the situation or what happened to my bag. So on the airport bench I slept, with my sleep being broken every few moments to check the safety of my belongings as well as my self. I guess you could say I “woke up early” to see what I could do now. China Eastern became blacklisted in my book when they still could not provide any information or guidance in regards to my bag. But life is good as the lost and found office and the accompanying airport security were the only nice people to help me out and furnish my bag. Heart attack avoided.

Unfortunately, even with all the time remaining, it would be impossible to do anything in the city and make it back for my delayed flight so I was stuck in the airport to ride the rest of the layover storm. Augh.