Shanghai in Retrospect (Part 4)

8 Apr 2008 (Day 5)

All good things must come to an end, and I’ve finally come to the last day of my stay in Shanghai. The thing was that it was really warm when I was in Hangzhou and Nanjing, but Shanghai was nothing like that. It was raining quite a fair bit when I got out of the Renzhi’s place (thanks RZ for putting me up for the few days) and I definitely didn’t like it to be cold, windy and rainy at the same time.

My flight was scheduled for 4 in the afternoon, but I left Renzhi’s place at about 9.30 because I didn’t want to waste my time hanging around doing nothing. I went to the Hongqiao airport first to leave my luggage there first, before heading back to downtown. As I was saying that every airport and train station has this huge signboard telling the world about the name of the place, Hongqiao airport was no exception:

After leaving my luggage, I took a bus and headed to the Hongqiao area, hoping to meet Gabriel for lunch. Given the busy man that he was, the lunch meeting was cancelled, so there went the change to try to con him into buying me lunch. But I still managed to meet Fionna, so that was still nice. Talking about nice, I finally had a change to be drinking something from Coffee Bean!

Both the 8th and 9th batch of NCSH thought that the Coffee Bean in Shanghai wasn’t good compared to that in Singapore, but I guess for someone like me who’s been deprived of Coffee Bean since returning to Hong Kong, anything from Coffee Bean anywhere would be good!

The weather in Shanghai that day wasn’t very good, as it was rainy, windy and foggy. As I made my way back to the Hongqiao airport, I was quite worried that my flight would be delayed. True enough, it did:

This is the first time in my life that a flight that I’m on is delayed. As I returned to the airport at about 1.30 in the afternoon, I actually had to sit around for almost 6 hours before I could board my plane. And honestly when I saw the message above, my heart skipped a bit. The Chinese words “由於飛機晚到” and “起飛時間待定” are actually quite unnerving. I mean, even the airport had no idea when the plane is going to arrive, let alone when it would depart. But it turned out that my flight is not the only one:

A whole screen full of delayed flights.

Finally I boarded the plane at about 7, but was made to wait until about 8.30 before the flight actually took off. If everything had gone on well, I should have been sitting in my Hong Kong home at 8.30. The 4-hour-plus delay really caused quite a bit of inconvenience. I was suppposed to be having afternoon tea on the plane, but in the end it turned out to be a dinner (which was barely edible):

In the end I reached home at about 12.30, which wasn’t fun considering that I had to go back to work immediately the next day. But then again, it could have been worse – I could have been stuck in Shanghai that night completely!