Friday morning, we got our luggage out our door for pick-up
bright and early as Brenda instructed us to do the evening before, and we
brought our passports to her at breakfast.
She said she would use them to get our boarding passes for the flight to
Yichang where we would board our ship.
I forgot to mention in my earlier post that the breakfast
buffet at the Shangri-La is international.
IHOP has nothing on this place.
We could choose from Chinese (salads and vegetables and dinner food and
- oh, the noodles!), English (love those grilled tomatoes and mushrooms), or
American (pancakes, waffles, omelets, bacon, yogurt and cereal) – and hordes of
fresh fruit. I had my first lichi (lychee?), which was pretty interesting. There was a melon with tiny black seeds
throughout the white meat. I didn’t like
that one so well. The big surprise,
however, was the watermelon. Watermelon
was served at every meal. I was in breakfast heaven.
From this breakfast Kathie and I absconded with some food
for lunch since lunch was to be on our own.
She picked up some smoked salmon and a roll; my choice was cheese and a
roll. Surreptitiously tucked those in Kathie’s bag and
we were off.
On our way to the airport we stopped at the Shanghai Museum where
we got more than our fill of non-modern Chinese art. I like that stuff ok but one can take only so
many old paintings of tall skinny mountains shrouded in mist with a little fat man
sitting in the window of a house at the foot of said mountains. Or Buddha sculptures – in every pose, every
medium, and every size. Or ethnic dress –
could we at least put the clothes on a manikin?
Personally, I would have liked to see some contemporary Chinese
art. Surely they have some of that
somewhere.
We drove to the airport where Brenda handed us our
passports and boarding passes. The group
melted into the lines for security and, as usual, I chose the line that took the
longest. Consequently, when the young
man at the desk told me that something on my boarding pass didn’t match the
corresponding whatever on my passport and that I would have to go back out to
the ticketing area to get it fixed, Kathie had already cleared security and was waiting
for me but everyone else had left the area and headed to the gate –
including Brenda our guide/babysitter/negotiator. I mouthed an explanation to Kathie, then
turned around and high-tailed it back out to the lobby.
Remembering Steve Martin’s advice, I explained my dilemma
slowly and clearly to the ticketing agent.
In turn, he explained slowly and clearly to me (several times, because
reading lips isn’t so easy when the lips speak with an accent) that I needed to
go down to A18 to have the supervisor – who looked like he was all of 20 years
old - fix my boarding pass. The whole
time I was imagining Brenda freaking out because she had lost one of her
ducklings.
When I returned to the security area with my corrected
boarding pass, there were Kathie and Brenda looking very
relieved to see me. I wasn’t out of the woods yet
though. No sirree, now I got to have the
scanner guy relieve me of all of my hand sanitizer. “What?? But I have it in my quart sized baggie of
liquids,” I wailed. No, he wasn’t having
any of that. It was flammable, he said. I should have packed it in my checked baggage,
he said.
I spent the rest of the trip in varying states of anxiety
that I didn’t have any hand sanitizer.
And this is why I don’t blog very often…I get so hung up
writing stream of consciousness stuff that I can only cover one day of travel at
a sitting. Throw in photographs and hyperlinks
to background material and I get, like, paralyzed in the quagmire of details.
