Our plane was scheduled to leave late at night, around 10PM from Shanghai Aiport. Friday was kind of a hectic day because I had to finish up all this work, make sure I did not leave off any projects midstream, bottlenecking any of my clients AND pack up all my shit (which for anyone who knows me takes me less than five minutes). By the time the afternoon came around, I was still behind on my work, which forced me to decide which work to pass up, which to rush, and which to finish. I finally ended up packing all my stuff and by five thirty, thirty minutes late, made my way to JJ’s work, three suitcases in total.

Before embarking on this traveling experience, I actually had minimal knowledge about what and where we were actually going. Since it was planned by JJ’s company (and since it was Chinese), I basically knew that we were going to the Philippines, to some nice resort, doing some fun stuff on each of the days and that most of the shit we did was paid in advance. Any details past that were still unknown. I eventually met up with JJ and then company and hopped on the shuttle bus to the Pudong Airport, a thirty minute ride from Pudong District where her company’s office resides.

The Pudong Airport is really huge and actually one of the nicest airports I’ve ever been to. JJ and I were talking about the aiport as we saw the it in the distance from the bus about how inconvenient it must be for the people that work at the airport to go to work everyday. Besides the obvious pros of the airport, its ginormous size, its advanced and modern design and it continual expansion, it is f***ing far away from anything remotely close to the ‘city’ of Shanghai. To take a bus takes at least 45 minutes. If you fly into Shanghai at night or too early in the morning, it sucks, because there is nothing in this area except airport.  So if the buses are not running, you are stuck with a super expensive taxi right into the city (and the possibility of getting scammed by bad taxi drivers, so don’t fall asleep!).

Another funny thing about the airport is that it reminds me of the times I’ve been at the airport. Since we were flying out of the country, the terminal for our flight was the very same terminal I was at when I flew back to the US the last time. In fact, when we finally boarded and went past that final stage of security where you needed a boarding pass to enter, we went through the same point that I had to go through the last time I left China and said bye to Kevin Liu and George. Good times.

When we finally checked in, I got my first taste of inefficiency, which you will discover in the rest of my blog post, happened quite often and drove me to the brink of insanity. We were part of a tour, but about half of the tour was JJ’s company, so it felt more like a big group than a tour. We did though, at the airport, have a tour guide of sorts. At the time, I was not really aware of her relationship to our vacation and our tour, but it turns out she was like the person that arranges the groups travel and makes sure we get from China to the Philippines safely and back to China when the tour was finished. So our very first interaction with this woman was when we checked in our bags with the airline. She had all of us stand in this strange single file line, verify that each of us were there by going down this list of names and making sure we were standing in the exact order of her list.  (There seemed to be many other ways do accomplish this, one being checking names off a list?  crazy idea?) Once she finished doing this (which took much too long), she told everyone to anty up on the order of $25 each for the tour guide’s tips. (This is for the tour guide who we had not yet met).

At the time I thought this was a bit strange, since a) I had not even began the vacation, much less met the tour guide. Plus b) this is China so whenever something like that happens, my immediate intuition is something fishy is going on. My reasoning at the time though was that probably Chinese people are not used to traveling to countries where the tipping is customary. So in order to avoid travelers who either don’t know what to tip, don’t tip altogether simply to avoid the hassle of doing this all at the end, they just tell everyone what to contribute and everyone gives the same amount. OK, at the time, I could deal with it.

So anyway, we finally got on the plane, China Eastern was our airline. I got to experience what I call the ‘airline attendent glance’ where, when you board the plane, they look at your face, decide if you look ‘white’ or if you look ‘Asian’ and depending on that decision, they say ‘Hello’ or ‘Ni Hao’. For me its fine (I guess), but I always feel bad for that Japanese guy or even the American Chinese guy who speaks native English who gets the Ni Hao every single time he’s in that situation.  I’ve never really spoken to someone in that situation, so any Asian readers out there who don’t speak Chinese, tell me your experience about that!

Personally, I think the food sucks on Chinese flights. I think the food actually sucks on all flights, but at least on most American flights, they have some kind of meat dish (your basic chicken and noodles). But the food on Chinese flights is the exact same every single time. It’s this concoction of noodles, some strange sauce, a small roll and really really small cup of apple juice. And they make that container of apple juice so incredibly hard to open, you have about a 50% chance of spilling it all over yourself (That percentage is higher if you are a Fannan).

The flight was 4 hours and by the time we finally arrived in Cebu, Philippines that is, it was really late, 2AM. The overall flght was not bad but I was pretty exhausted by that time, as was everyone else on the plane. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Cebu is not really a huge city. The aiport was kind of a joke and reall small (memories of the Molokai airport maybe?). Almost immediately after arrival, we had to go though this tiny area where you would normally fill out any customs documents and declare stuff. Considering the fact that they usually give these types of documents on the plane, during the flight, so that when you arrive at your destination, you avoid the wasted time of filling these annoying and and useless documents out. But, for some reason, they did not do this.  Maybe I am in a different boaty than others, but I think for most people, this is a two second job.  You fill out this dumb paper, you declare nothing, you give them the paper, and probably nobody ever looks at it again.  Its a waste of time and filling this thing out as soon as humanly possible has been my experience in the past, especially if its 2 f***ing AM!

So imagine the scene, we have a tour group of Chinese people, say 35 people. About 2 of them speak good English (ME and JJ). A good majority of them speak very basic English and then there are the older folk who really speak no English whatsoever and I would be surprised if they can even write out the ABC’s themselves. So now, we are at a customs section of the airport at 2AM in the morning with basically a group of people who have to fill out this customs document, in English, with absolutely no clue what to do. To top it off, I discovered at the airport, our first ‘Chinese’ woman tour guide also speaks no English (Only in China would a tour guide have the job of getting us through the aiport and through the customs and not even speak a language to communicate with the customs agents). So this was just a complete mess and we wasted like 30 and maybe even 45 minutes at this customs area waiting for everyone to write their converted Chinese names into ABC format. Quite comical now that I think about it but at the time, I couldn’t help myself look up and ask ‘WHY??’

Finally though, we got out of the stupid airport, got our bags, and boarded our charter bus which we used for the rest of the trip. We met our official tour guide on the bus and made our way to our first hotel location, which we discovered was sort of a hotel / casino hybrid.   Our tour guide was Chinese but had been living in the Philippines since his father moved their when he was 10.  He spoke basically native Phillipino, but his English was a joke.

The hotel was pretty luxurious and the quality of the hotel was pretty westernized. We eventually got checked in and it was like 4 AM or maybe even 5 AM when all our shit was in the room and it was time to hit the tables, so to speak. We were kind of curious at the casino, and most of us actually went to do some gambling or at least look at the gambling.

For most Chinese people, unless they have been to Hong Kong or Macau, or a place like this, the idea of gambling or even the site of gambling is pretty unique and even strange. They have only seen casino’s in the movies and they really have little concept about casino games (blackjack, craps, slot machines, video poker). Maybe since I come from a gambling town, these games are so common to me, but to most people here, they are simply these games that they’ve never seen before. So just witnessing the first reactions of the other people on the tour step inside the casino was pretty funny and interesting.

JJ and I exchanged some money into Philippino money and paraded around the casino, mostly just looking but eventually digging in and trying some slots for ourselves. The table games were strange because the limits were crazy. The blackjack games were had a minimum of $10 per hand, which in Vegas or Tahoe is fine, but in the Philippines, that is ridiculous. Considering the slots were drastically lower than Vegas slots (they mostly had quarter and nickel  machines and a few with higher stakes), so $10 was quite a lot. (At least too much to have a good time without risking losing a lot of money). We played some video poker but at least for me, that gets old way too quickly. It is like fake poker without skill, without bluffing and without bullshitting other players (sorry Grandpa, Mom, Dad and anyone else I offended… you know who you are).

By the time our casino excitement had worn off, we called it a night (or a morning since it was 6AM). As we were leaving the casino though, a fellow co-worker of JJ’s reminded us that the buffet had just opened and stayed open until 10AM so we might as well get breakfast before we went to sleep. It was a good suggestion and we headed down to the breakfast place.

Now being a son of Bob Fannan, my eye is always open for the next great hotel breakfast. Although I am not really a breakfast person myself and in fact, don’t really care much about eating breakfast, both at home and on vacation, this is not that impotant to me. BUT, I naturally keep an interest in the quality of the breakfast, especially on vacation, and I must say, this place had a fantastic spread. First, it was enormous. They had stations upon stations upon stations. The hotel was actually not THAT big so considering that fact, the buffet was quite large. They had all this great stuff, including your basic omelette bar, salad bar (with salad dressings I have not seen in months), dry cereal, hot cereal, eggs, hashbrowns, fruit. Oh yah fruit, they had fresh mango, fresh papaya. Drinks, they had good coffee, fresh juice (mango juice which was processed but still pretty darn good). It was just a Western breakfast spread that would have passed the Bob Fannan System of Hotel Breakfast Quality (BFHBQ).

Afteer getting stuffed with food all the way from omelettes, payapa and cheerios to corned beef hash, salad with French dressing and cheese slices (yes, you heard me right, CHEESE!), we went back to the hotel and passed out.